


Any Where Out of the World

by astronicht (1Boo)



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: 19th century science, Accidental Baby Acquisition, Canon Era, Censorship, Feminist Themes, Fix-It, Grisettes, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Kid Fic, Multi, Nuns, Original Character(s), Period Typical Attitudes, Politics, Romanticism, Unplanned Pregnancy, bouzingos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-03-22 10:41:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 52,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13762398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1Boo/pseuds/astronicht
Summary: In November of 1826, a slight complicating factor appears. Her name is Amantine.





	1. In which the plan is changed

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty sure this was supposed to be a short oneshot back in uhhh 2013 when a tumblr buddy asked for some baby!fic, and I wanted to write about a group of friends like the ones I missed back home. Since 2013 the file name of this has been "there will be no pollination jokes, or, the one where r is a babydaddy". I'd say the bare bones writings is about 75% finished, assuming it'll come out to around 100k, unless another subplot sneaks in.
> 
> This is a story that deals with a few of things I don't have personal experience with, so please let me know if I've messed something up a/o need to add tags/post warnings. I do my research but I am definitely fallible and responsible storytelling is important, etc etc. More tags will be added as we go. The rating will probs also change.
> 
> People do have first names in this fic, though I tried to rely on surnames so as to not make it super weird. Rachèl is a masculine name pronounced Rah-shell.
> 
> "Enfin, mon ame fait explosion, et sagement elle me crie : N'importe ou! n'importe ou! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce mond!"  
> \- Any Where Out of the World, Charles Baudelaire

In the last week of June a woman sometimes known as Floréal found Rachèl Grantaire sprawled on a public bench in the Tuileries Park.

It was a warm and sticky dawn, settling in low gray clouds over the river and in the humid air under the beech trees that led up to the steps of the Tuileries Palace to the east, and downriver to Louis the 15th Square. His bench was well-situated, as befitted a man who knew the city well. It was placed with all the strategy of an urban general just far enough from the holly hedges which edged the long park that the smell of the hedges (which were the unfortunate victims of a lack of public bathrooms) did not quite reach him. The city was almost still this early in the morning after such a humid night; there was no breeze to unsettle him, no police officer to unseat him - yet his was not a face at ease. Even in sleep, before Floréal approached, he was not a handsome man, though he was young and not terribly deformed from the smallpox nor syphilis, which were sometimes unfortunate realities. His skin was deeply tanned like a Spaniard, though he did not know or care to know his familial origin. His hair black and formed into natural ringlets where it was not matted between his skull and the bench, and might have been attractive were it not a bit greasy. His nose was large, his mouth thin but long, so that any little expression of his seemed magnified, sometimes clownish. He wore trousers, not stockings and culottes, for he was friends with liberals and that was what was done in their circles.

His eye, when one cracked open, was bloodshot, his gaze dark. Squinting up at his visitor, he had the eyes of an ancient Byzantine painting. One almost felt drawn in by them, in the right circumstances.

Grantaire himself was surprised to see that woman he called Floréal silhouetted against the bright green of midsummer beech leaves, but glad. He would have been happier still to see her last night, before he’d slept a night on a hard bench in a public garden instead of in her little attic room in the garret. He thought he might still be a little drunk.

Floréal strode right up to his bench and pushed away his matted curls to pinch his neck.

Grantaire moaned into the shoulder of his greatcoat, “My flower, my Persephone, Madame Floréal! How lovely it is to be rudely awoken by you!" He knew better than to fend her off, or protest that he’d already been awake.

Consciousness, full consciousness, drove in then. The world beyond the Tuileries asserted itself; Grantaire could feel it like the gunshot cracks of thawing pond ice: first the noise, then the flood. “Oh," he said, just, "Oh. I have news.

On their own accord his hands were fumbling across his body as they were wont to do upon waking, to check that all was vaguely where it was supposed to be. It was definitely too hot for a greatcoat, yet Grantaire seemed to be wearing one. It was not his. In fact, it was considerably more fashionable than his.

Grantaire’s news was that night before last, lying awake and naked in his bed listening to mosquitos fly back and forth between his walls, he’d decided to quit painting. He planned to break it to Master Gros later in the week, but he didn’t mind if his sometimes-friend Floréal knew first.

“You have news? So have I,” retorted Floréal. She had the talent of slinging her words like stones.

Grantaire finally managed a long look at Floréal. She was a very pretty girl, and even sharper than she was pretty. Her hair was very dark brown, and she was not pale; her complexion was in shades of dusky copper. Her height and figure were average, though both benefited from her skill as a seamstress, which was how she made a meagre living as one of Paris' unmarried working girls, called grisettes by some wit sometime in the past and now stuck with it. He called her Floréal, but her name was Sophie-Philip Gaugin.

Grantaire had met her when she came to the Academie des Beaux Arts while he was first a student there, and she was earning some extra by modelling Scheherazade from the Arabian Nights for Master Gros's figure-drawing class. Hers was a familiar face, a familiar story to Rachèl Grantaire.

Today however, there was something about her face, about her eyes. Her hands were folded in front of her gray gown, cradling herself.

Floréal was usually a figure of distantly indulgent smiles and a sharp longing for some horizon of hers that Grantaire could not see. Today there was something of that longing turned to a storm clashing under her skin.

He watched the low clouds roil over the Seine behind her, and in an odd moment of wisdom, waited to hear why she had sought him out. As the city pigeons began to stir in the muggy dawn, she deigned to tell him.

It was 1826; it was Paris. In April, the internal combustion engine had been patented. A week ago, the first true photo had been taken. Beethoven was fifty-six; Thomas Jefferson would die next week on the 4th of July. Twenty-one years ago, the Haitian slave revolt had freed one of the first islands enslaved by Europeans in the New World; only next month would France formally recognize a Haitian by citizenship. Jane Austen had already been dead nine years, whereas in the United States, men and women still lived who were older than their country. Marie Pasteur would be born soon, and Chopin was already sixteen. This was the Western world, the great growling beast of unchecked ambition. Kings could fall, but empire and industry would live forever.

Rachèl Grantaire had no real cognition of this; he was, like most young men, distracted by his own affairs, which this muggy morning were undergoing quite a sea-change. The end result of their conversation in the Tuileries Park: one disappeared for five months. The other did not quit painting.

***

“Alms for _âmes_ ,” Grantaire announced two weeks later, shambling into his usual haunt, the Cafe Giovanna. Somehow he'd managed to look worse than when he had been sleeping on the park bench, but his wide mouth was set in a mocking smile. “A sou for a soul!”

“Oh, do shut up, Grantaire,” the woman behind the counter said. Grantaire bowed to her, sweeping off his cap, which he then presented upside down, beseeching. He swayed on his feet a little, not because he was drunk but because he was sober after two weeks of the alternative.

“I collect coin for a church function, mademoiselle.”

“Only if this cafe is your church you do,” said Mademoiselle Giovanna, a young second generation Sicilian very aware of her hereditary power of glare. "You owe me two francs from May, still."

“Yes, yes,” Grantaire said distractedly, for he had found the young men he had come into Giovanna’s searching for. “Monsieur Lesgles! Monsieur Joly!”

Two young well-to-do Parisian university students looked up from a table by the window, where they had been sniggering at passersby. They made a strange pair: Monsieur Lesgles pale, shorter, and bearded with a thick Alsace accent, Monsieur Joly a tall young Haitian with crisp vowels and a walking stick. As these things happened, they both claimed the Christian name Louis, and as they were great friends, both thought it a lovely joke on the part of the Almighty (whom they halfheartedly believed in). Both moved in unison to greet Grantaire.

“Monsieur Rachèl Grantaire! Our favourite _rapin_ and _homme des lettres_ -” Grantaire was the only painting student they knew, so this wasn’t much of a distinction, “ - what news?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Grantaire said, feeling himself internally reel at the ridiculous lie. “I have merely come to beg for money.” That was true, at least.

“A worthy pursuit,” said Louis Lesgles, who was a law student whose parents regularly forgot to send him his pin money. “Joly here is my benefactor of choice.”

The tall Haitian laughed, and gestured Grantaire to come knock knees with them at their little table.

Lesgles greeted him warmly. “Tell us of your troubles, R, and we shall weep with you. What is it you need? A mistress to be wooed, the price of a pistol for a duel, the price of a present to make a policeman forget about a duel?”

“Not at all," grinned Grantaire, "I need to present a dowry.”

Louis Joly spat his Turkish coffee onto Louis Lesgles’s waistcoat.

“At least you missed my cravat,” Lesgles said diplomatically. "It's Ciprian's, so it'll be easier to return without the stains."

“Shocking, I know,” Grantaire said sympathetically to Joly.

Louis Joly was laughing; he was the sort of young man who would never have wasted good coffee on anything but laughter.

“Oh come Grantaire, really? Who is the lucky bride? The famous La Musichetta? Or is she less of the opera, more of the dance halls?” There was an eyebrow waggle. Grantaire fought not to drift away from reality when reality looked quite so surreal.

“I would swear to you that Miss Mars winked at me when I was last at the Odéon," Grantaire said, mostly giving up and just opening his mouth, curious to see what words would spill out. "But no, alas, she is cold to me, as are the females of the world, for I haven’t a mistress, nor a wife, but I assure you gentlemen that I am in great need of a dowry. Or rather, half a dowry. I’m taking some work from Gros as you would say, _pro bono_ , to cover the rest.”

And hadn't _that_ been a fun conversation. Gros knew know details, and had agreed, but was only speaking to Grantaire through one of his other students even when Grantaire was in the room. Grantaire was not looking forward to how long this would keep up.

“Ah, so you and the painting master are going into this marriage together, I see, at least financially. How bohemian of you," said Louis Lesgles, thoughtfully stroking his beard.

“Isn’t it so?” smiled Joly. They could and would go on like this together for at least half an hour.

Grantaire intervened, and dragged up a chair and sat down next to Joly, cap outstretched, his face in a pout he had learned from flirty grisettes. Lesgles laughed uproariously, and Joly said, “Fine, my man, fine. How much do you need. I shall have you pay for it by...forging my Classics exam. That is a worthy payout indeed.”

Louis Joly was studying to become a doctor and had very little interest in Classics. They were, however, a required course for a gentleman's education. Fortunately, nearly all exams were written essays which were timed and took place in resplendent Great Halls, into which hundreds of desks and young men were packed. If one was subtle enough, one could easily have a friend write the essay, copy it out in one's own handwriting, stuff the illicit copy in the breast of one's coat, and carefully switch it with the provided paper on the desk without a proctor noticing.

“As you wish,” said Grantaire, wiggling his hat. He could write reams on any subject, from any viewpoint but perhaps his own.

A number was agreed upon, and that was that. Grantaire only felt a little like an embarrassment.

Before Grantaire could leave, however, a blast of wet air announced another customer coming in from the warm summer rain. Swift shuffling steps crossed to their table, and a foot in a black felt slipper hooked around the rung of a chair and dragged it across to their table. Gray dress and white petticoats, a little muddy, thumped down onto the chair.

“Jacques!” cried the two Louis together.

Jacqueline was a thin young woman with a sharp chin and elbows. Her eyes were wide, liquid black and a little bloodshot; her hair was dark as well, but her skin was paler even than Louis Lesgles. Against Grantaire and especially Louis Joly, she was downright pallid.

The young lady sat sidesaddle on her chair, rested her elbows on the back of it, pushed back her wide bonnet and glared directly at Grantaire.

Then she pointedly turned away, and to Louis Joly she said, “Where has Grantaire _been?”_ It was Lesgles who shrugged, saying,

“Well, he just wandered in here, Jacques. We haven’t seen him otherwise since the party two weeks ago - did you get lost going home, R?” he joked.

“Lost going home for three weeks?” demanded Jacqueline, kicking Grantaire’s chair.

“I slept that night in the Tuileries,” said Grantaire, trying to make this statement funny, but his smile felt stretched thinner. “On a bench.”

“I… hope you’ve found your way home since,” said Louis Joly, frowning and obviously coming to an inaccurate conclusion regarding Grantaire’s loan-collecting. Wanly, Grantaire tried to smile again. He’d felt fine just a minute ago, but it seemed his mood was plummeting.

“I’ve been busy,” he said.

“Well now, come out to-night! Drink with me!” said Jacqueline, laughing and kicking his chair again. Before he could unstick his tongue to respond, she turned to Louis Joly and added, “Oh, Lu, before I forget, Monsieur Apollo wanted you to come early to the Corinthe, before supper.”

Joly just nodded, and after a beat of silence which Grantaire realized he would normally have filled, Grantaire blurted, “I like your ribbon,” to Jacqueline. Jacqueline’s hair was messy and her looped bun slightly lopsided, like she’d woken at noon and rushed her toilette, but looped through the bun was a bright red ribbon. With her cheap gray dress, her cheap black slippers, her cheap gray bonnet hanging by its strings down her back, it stood out. It did not make his observation sound any less insipid. Begging for money, now barely able to make conversation. He tired of himself.

“I shall still be wearing it to-night,” frowned Jacques, eyes searching his face. “At which point you may admire it all you like.”

Grantaire felt his face do something strange, some grimace. His fingers drummed on the table, and even as they did so they shook a little. This felt like a betrayal. He had strong hands, dexterous where the rest of him was nervous, bumbling, half-lost. Without steady hands he could not sketch, could not paint.

“I cannot tonight,” he muttered, stomach dropping when she leaned in, mouth pursed in a frown, about to speak again. He had bedded her occasionally, in the past. Not in the last year, and she was not angling for it, but still he wanted to step back. She smelled very slightly of gin.

Louis Joly, perhaps sensing Grantaire’s awkwardness, broke in with, “Euh, Jacques, what is it I’m needed for at the Corinthe before supper?”

“Monsieur Apollo wants us all there to discuss the new group in the Commons, Lu, and Lesgles said last week he had a class he couldn't miss, so of course _one of you_ must come.” Louis Lesgles nodded to this. “It’s hardly important right now, anyhow, when Grantaire doesn’t love us anymore.”

“The new - the Royalist Liberals?” asked Louis Joly.

At this moment in the conversation Grantaire felt the slight sick taste in the back of his mouth suddenly slide down and curdle in his stomach. He wanted nothing more than to be away from this humid, crowded cafe full of familiar faces, who expected him to be able to keep laughing and carrying on with the show. He wanted something to drink; something harsh on his tongue, or the sweet smoke of opium to let him sleep for once. Jacqueline’s cat-eyes narrowed at him. He thought again that it must be that he smelled gin on her - not her breath, but in her sweat or her clothes, or perhaps it was just his mind playing tricks, showing him what it wanted. He felt himself break out in a cold sweat. He had not even had a drink since dawn two days ago; how could just the scent of alcohol make him ill? Suddenly he was sure he was about to be sick, and that the two Louis and Jacqueline would continue to stare at him, perplexed, while he was. Like a dog making a mess on the floor.

“Why not, R?” Jacques asked, mouth twisted down. “What’s wrong with you lately? Come with us to-night to the dance halls. Even Apollo will be along with us if we're all to sup at the Corinthe, at least while it’s still early.”

Grantaire’s whole body was against him. He held his hands in his lap, to keep the shake from showing. He was not as dark as Joly, and thus he thought the way he paled must have been obvious, and it felt like his lips and cheeks were numb, like he might faint.

“I must go,” he said, and made an ungainly scramble out of his chair, away from their tiny table, stumbling on his way to the door. He left them staring after him, even mademoiselle Giovanna, who was halfway to their table with - God - his usual glass of cheap red wine.

“Well, I’ll take care of your, euh, request, Grantaire,” Louis Joly called after him. He nodded, not looking back at their faces, staring after him, perplexed and uneasy, annoyed and suspicious.

“But he never-” he heard Jacques begin, but then he was out, choking on wet air, on the steam and the rain.

This was how summer began for him, and how it ground forward into the autumn. Louis Joly did, however, keep up his end of the bargain. The dowry, when it came together, was almost respectable.

***

Five months later, a familiar knock sounded on the downstairs door of Grantaire’s building on the Rue d'Elephante. There had been a lot of those knocks of late, but it was the day of _La Toussaint_ , the beginning of November, and this would be, Grantaire hoped, the last knock of its kind. The landlady grunted downstairs and the door was opened for a bourgeois gentleman. Grantaire could hear the tread of his fine boots on the stairs.

The knock on the door to his rooms was softer. Grantaire, eyes cold and smile wide and stupid, opened it to Monsieur Luc Poulin; banker, petit-bourgeoisie, and anxious fiancé.

“Monsieur Poulin, come in,” he said, widening the smile so that it showed all his teeth, including the gaps. It was a buffoon’s smile, and he moved like a buffoon to match it. It was easy to do; Grantaire had always felt like a caricature of himself. Years ago he had come across the work of James Gillray through a fellow student at the Academy, and discovered in Gillray’s grotesques a familiar sort of humanity, particularly the bit with the wine tax and Silenus.

But he digressed.

“Grantaire,” Monsieur Poulin greeted him, shuffling through the door. It was always ‘Grantaire’, never a _monsieur_ in sight, much less a _citoyen_. Mind, “citizen” was an illegal address since the end of the Revolution, but Grantaire did not feel the need to be generous. Grantaire poured wine and put out a few meat pies. It was amazing how much more easily a man would trust someone who provided meat pies, he mused.

“What news of your cousin?” Monsieur Poulin asked, perched uncomfortably on Grantaire’s desk chair, which Grantaire rarely used. He preferred to stand up to paint or sketch, and the desk was covered with studies for Gros’s latest project, and a few small jobs he’d passed directly to Grantaire. Grantaire himself was perched on a piano stool which he’d won last week at a game of whist (he had fortunately lost the piano), and hadn’t yet found an excuse to gamble away again.

“There has been some change; did my cousin not mention it in her letters?” Grantaire asked the dapper man, who clutched his hat and appeared annoyed at this news.

He wouldn’t be annoyed in a minute, so long as Grantaire and Floréal had played their game well. Grantaire very much hoped it would be worth pretending the be related to the friend with whom some rather sinful transgressions had been, well, transgressed into. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, to throw Luc Poulin further off the scent; now calling Floreal ‘cousin’ just made him feel a little unwell.

“She did not mention anything now,” Monsieur Poulin said. He had a neatly trimmed beard and moustache, which saved him from a youthful face, despite being nine-and-twenty or thereabouts. His moustache looked especially annoyed just now.

Grantaire had met with Floréal’s fiancé many times since Floréal had fled to the countryside with Grantaire’s baby four months in her belly and just beginning to show. He was glad – deep down, and never admitted to – that Floréal had found someone, but he was still unsure of the nature of Poulin’s attachment. Grantaire and Floréal were friends, not lovers, and he only cursed her taste – a banker, by God, a _banker_ – and her timing. Or his own timing. Both? Anyway, the timing was very bad.

“It regards our aunt,” Grantaire said, and at Poulin’s pained look he added hastily, “who has recently passed away!” Poulin still looked slightly put off that Grantaire had been the one to receive the recent news of Poor Aunt Cathérine, who Floréal and Grantaire had invented in a flurry of letters back and forth between Paris and a little fishing village in Brittany after the initial excuses for Floréal’s absence ran thin. Grantaire hurried to add the happy news. “But I see you haven’t heard her second piece of news. My cousin, your fiancée, will return to Paris as soon as the funeral is over. She hopes this Sunday. Here, please take the letter. I know she would not mind.”

He shuffled around the papers on his desk for show. He never left correspondence there, unless he was planning to use the paper for charcoal sketches later on. Floréal’s real letter to him, not the decoy that he handed Poulin, was curled ashes in the fireplace.

He wished a little that he hadn’t had to burn all of her letters. They were some of the last pieces of Floréal he would have all to himself. Here Poulin was, ready to steal her away to a life of - what exactly did bankers do? Things like annual sums and profitable loans and high interest rates, which were more nonsensical to Grantaire’s ears than a foreign language.

Greek he could make sense of, and English too, but he could not do sums or multiply. Well, he could _multiply_ —proof enough in this situation—but not in a way Poulin and his banker friends would appreciate. Could he make sense of a comfortable bourgeois life? Grantaire could not imagine comfortable. Grantaire was four-and-twenty and had been the boy who at twelve years old was convinced that he would die in a gutter before his thirtieth birthday. In the past year, that premonition had felt like a rising storm, held off only by more and more wine, and sometimes nights when Floréal allowed him up into her attic room – empty now, rent unpaid, gone to another grisette perhaps – and allowed him to let his mind go blank when his hands met her skin.

Now that was done, and hopefully his drinking was done, and perhaps soon Grantaire could be done with this conversation. 

But looking at Luc Poulin, he couldn't help but think - if money was all that mattered, then what use was a man who looked at numbers and saw nothing but discordant noise, like the orchestra in the pit of the Odéon tuning all at once? At least he was honestly miserable. He’d not admitted it to himself until that moment, perched on a piano stool and facing down the man whose fiancée had born Grantaire’s baby about three days ago. Grantaire wanted to laugh. He wanted someone to catch him crying. He wanted to go mad with it. He felt like he was choking on the entire world, that someone was making him swallow the Seine, the Channel, the whole hot bathwater of the Mediterranean.

He couldn’t even think about the reality of the baby, or the promise he’d sworn from a bench in the Tuileries, sweating in another man’s coat. Not yet, not till this was done and buried.

Instead he handed Monsieur Poulin the decoy letter, meticulously penned by Floréal. Grantaire had penned the letters from the dying Aunt himself, years of copying lines and forms in paintings translating perfectly into forgery. By the beginning of the fall months he’d been running a small but fleetingly popular business faking essays for the written exams required of the students at the university. Monsieur Joly remained his first and best customer.

“This is good news,” said Poulin, smiling at last. He had a handsome smile, and a polite face which blended into whichever company he was in. Grantaire didn’t trust anyone whose soul did not show on their face; maybe it was why he appreciated being in the company of someone like the man they called Apollo. But of course - he had not gone to the Corinthe that night with Jacqueline, and he had not seen Apollo since the spring, and even that had been in the first week after Floréal told him, and he was drunk in the street and having a screaming argument over nothing he could recall with an orange-girl who let rooms across the way from the Cafe Giovanna. Apollo had come outside and thrown a wooden trencher with oysters still on it at Grantaire's head and yelled at him to go home before the police tried to shut down Madame Gio's establishment.

"Lovely news," Luc Poulin was murmuring under his breath, unaware of Grantaire's lapse in focus. Grantaire wanted to respond that this 'good news' was that his dear Aunt had just died, thank you very much, but held his tongue. Or, rather, he babbled away pleasantries; holding Grantaire’s tongue simply wasn’t done, unless one was very dexterous with one’s own tongue, in which case some exception could be allowed for. "I'll have to make arrangements for her, of course. Why I couldn't get a letter faster is beyond me; the post is absolutely abysmal. She could easily arrive tonight!"

"Can I help you, m'sieur?" Grantaire asked with wide eyes. He thought at first that it was too sarcastic and would be taken as a slight, but Poulin really did think he was merely helpful and simple.

"If you see her, or hear news of her, please direct her to this address," Poulin said, taking up a grease pencil and scribbling down the name and street of a respectable hotel. "I will write her, but it is likely our letters will cross."

"Consider it done," said Grantaire, taking the paper and folding it between his fingers.

Floréal’s letter - that last letter, arrived and burnt this morning - had been signed with a rough sketch of a daisy, the way Grantaire had taught her to draw, once. She had nimble fingers from her sewing work but little interest in sketching, much more in being sketched.

There was a little more polite conversation, but eventually Poulin tired of the buffoon and left, face oddly relieved even as he grumbled about the needlessly difficult logistics.

Rachèl Grantaire saw him off, lit a candle, and slowly cut himself half a meat pie to chew. He waited.

 

***

_Bacchus,_

_It is done and the child is alive. Maman had me rub her down with mustard, for she was born with the chord around her neck, and there was a fear that it might have choked her. It did not, I think. I am returning as soon as I am able without tearing the stitches or dropping dead. Uncle M will drive me as far as Montmartre on the vegetable wagon._

_Female, pale eyes, dark hair._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay some notes! 
> 
> \- don't sleep in the Tuileries gardens in 1826. There were no public bathrooms in Paris, so mostly ppl just selected their favorite hedges. In central Paris, that's the Tuileries
> 
> \- i know, i know, the joke it that everyone's called Jean but i like the two Louis. "Lu" as a nickname for Joly is in my heart now u cannot claw it out.
> 
> \- i named floreal after a women's hockey player by accident
> 
> \- The Gillray cartoon Grantaire relates to is "Silenus and the Wine Tax"
> 
> \- Grantaire rambles abt math a lot in this. he's probably discalculaic but it's not something anyone knows is a thing, so.
> 
>  
> 
> I'm @astronicht on twitter, come yell with me


	2. In which Floreal becomes Sophie-Philip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- there are a few references to what a body does after having a baby; not a ton but just a heads up.

In the last gloom before dawn on the day of the Feast of All Saints, for which the churches of Paris were all lit in shining candle wax and marble, a young woman hurried through familiar streets. Her path angled towards a neighborhood that blurred the edges of the faubourg St Germain's mansions of the aristos with the tangle of the slums spreading like an inkblot from the Ile du Cité. Rising on either side of her were tall houses with dark windows, the territory of university students with little time for mass, or just stumbling home from a friend’s or a gambling house or an opium den. She was dressed all in gray, and her hair was veiled like a countryside girl. In her arms was a bundle.

In the churches there was silence, the warm smell of beeswax and starched Sunday petticoats. They felt warm, and sleepy, and they were not where Floréal was going.

The landlady was not at Grantaire's door; she attended Saint-Severin for services on holy days. Grantaire sat in the doorway on the portress’ chair, a sprawl of a man in shades of umber, topped with inky curls, heedless of the draft the ground floor inhabitants would complain of in the morning. He did not smoke his pipe, or sip wine. He sat and watched the wind sidle down the street. He thought of nothing. It was almost peaceful.

When his visitor appeared on the street corner, he did not move, but waited until she was nearly upon him, then turned and gestured her inside. With care, he closed the portress' door and did up the latch, and followed her up the creaking stairs.

In Grantaire’s apartments, they closed the door behind them. Floréal raised both her eyebrows; Grantaire raised his. All the stillness felt gone from him; he did not know what to do, what clever thing to say.

“I have not named her,” Floréal said stiffly, and passed a tiny baby to Grantaire, like if she did this without formality it couldn’t matter as much as it did.

"Oh," said Grantaire.

“Lord, this is out of a be-damned novel.” She leaned against the door, hands on her face, half laughing.

"Absolutely not," Grantaire muttered, "it would never make it past a publisher, must less the censors."

Then Grantaire looked down, at a baby’s face. That was what it was for a moment: a baby’s face. The slightest hint of fuzz on the top of its head; flush-cheeked and a bit paler than both of them. Then something happened, and he was holding his daughter, the sweet small weight of her, and he touched her face, he touched one knuckle. His heart raced as if he was afraid, but he did not feel afraid. There was no room. Not just this moment. He clutched her. He looked at her face.

Her eyes stuttered open. They were that changeable blue some newborns got. Did that mean that his and Floréal’s few drops of Moorish blood might not have come through, or would they darken with time? He did not know how infants worked, beyond the most basic of human mechanics. 

The baby's mouth was smaller than the tip of Grantaire's pinky. She opened it, snuffled a moment, and began to cry in earnest.

“Ah yes,” Floréal said, pushing off from the door, rubbing her face. “You still make the same first impression as always, Bacchus.”

Grantaire couldn't seem to respond in kind. Very awkwardly, very softly, he tried to bounce her a little like he had seen done. But never with a baby this small. Had he ever seen a baby this small? While he sat in dumb silence, the baby seemed to get over her initial surprise and stopped crying as suddenly as she’d started.

“Do you need a place to rest until the sun is up?” he asked, too quietly, too intimate. He did not mean it that way, but he was looking at the baby and was not meeting her eyes, so perhaps she mistrusted him. Perhaps she had reason to; proof here in his hands. Now that he saw the baby, he knew that he wanted her in a way that had nothing to do with any of his guilty, feverish promises. And now that he held her he could not fathom doing anything else. There was so much joy in it! He'd expected this to be a heavy moment, a solemn affair. He had not expected the joy, inescapable, spreading like dawn light over quiet countryside. Inevitable and huge. He felt, awfully, as if somehow was stealing the baby from her - but of course she had told him from the start that she would place the infant with a convent if necessary. This was after Grantaire had already blurted out - well. He had been desperate. He had been afraid. He had wanted, like a chastized child, to make it right. And here they were, the three of them.

“I can’t,” Floréal said, too quickly. “I should leave.”

Grantaire said, very quietly, “As you wish, Floréal.” He found the note in Luc Poulin's hand, and passed it to her. "He's told the hotel to expect you."

“Don’t be nice to me, Rachèl Grantaire,” said Floréal. “And I suppose you shouldn’t call me Floréal, anymore. It will be strange to hear Sophie-Philip.”

“Floréal was a name for someone else,” he said, and could not tell if there was any bitterness there or not. But in this moment, how could there be? She had made another creature, formed from her own clay like a god of old, like the Madonna.

The woman laughed shortly. She looked at the baby. She stepped closer, and put a hand on the bundle. “My sister nursed her, but you will need a wet nurse, and milk every two hours," she said, instead of anything else. "Maman says there's a sort of gruel that works too, if you can't get a wet nurse full time." She touched the baby's hand, smoothed her little shock of black hair. Her knuckles knocked against Grantaire's chest. Then she stepped away, met his eyes once, and pressed her hand to the door.

“Goodbye,” said Grantaire mildly to the soft whine of the hinges, to a friend's footsteps echoing away, away.

The little weight was warm.

***

Within the hour, the streets of Paris were startled by the dawn. Floréal hurried along them, still bent like she held a burden. Her breasts still leaked and her figure was not quite her own; despite the deep early November chill the small of her back was drenched in sweat. She had little choice but to walk. The brand-new but quite popular omnibus would not run until the bells rang out seven o’clock, but around her the workers of the city were beginning to stir, at least in the part of town she aimed for. An hour’s morning walk, which had been nothing to her in the past was her exodus now. Her heart in her throat she approached a rambling tenement building that had not been hers - hers had been several twists and turns away - and whistled three notes. Then twice more, when nothing happened.

A general could never be sure which battle of the war would be her Waterloo. She hoped hers wasn't standing on the chipped flagstones above a frosty gutter, blinking blurriness from her eyes and hoping making this one stop would not be her undoing.

A small window in the slanted roof cracked open. She could just make out a shock of long red hair, another gray dress, the guttering stub of a candle.

“I didn’t think you would really come back, Sophie-Philip” a voice called down.

“Well, I have,” Floréal called up. Tipping her head back just made her dizzy. She felt a badly timed course of blood flow free; she had been bleeding for days and had been assured that she would bleed for days and weeks yet, but she had no one to ask if this much was normal. She could only clench her teeth and believe that this too would be survived. “Do you mean to tell me you've taken my things to the market, Jeannette?” she called.

It was hard to tell, but her best guess was that the young woman upstairs rolled her eyes.

“Come up and help me with your trunk. You can hire a wagonette from the landlady.”

“This early, I can fit a few a single trunk in the omnibus,” Floréal said. She blinked again, harder. Her vision had blurred sometimes in the long months with child, until she'd had to get her little brother to thread her needle for her. She had hoped it would stop now.

Heaving in a breath, Sophie-Philip climbed the step and knocked on the shabby portess' door; the knocker was gone. After a few long minutes the landlady herself cracked the door and glared, her face lit by a single candle from within. She was still in her nightcap and slippers, and cross about it.

“Mademoiselle Sophie-Philip Gaugin, here for Jeannette Žiga, in the garret,” Floréal said, wondering if she was going to have to try to wedge one of her feet into the door to get in. “I lent her some things, she knows I’m coming.”

“As you please, I'm sure,” the thin old landlady muttered, inching open the door so Floréal could barely shove herself through. Her glare said that if they were about to start any untoward business at six in the morning in her place, they would live to regret it. Floréal crossed the little foyer and the door to the landlady's rooms with measured steps as if she were on a dance floor, counting out beats. She held her head high.

It was well and good that the landlady did not go so far as to follow her up and verify her identity and purpose with Jeannette, for she nearly threw up on the stairs.

Jeannette met her at the top of them, in the long, low hallway. Behind closed doors, there was shuffling, dim candlelight. Somewhere, a baby whimpered. Floréal flinched.

Jeannette was tall and had strong features, straight red hair, and dark eyes; she looked nothing like the popular French concept of a gypsy but her friends all knew she was Hungarian Romani all the way back on her mother's side. Her father worked transporting goats on flat-bottom boats along the Canal du Midi, and she had grown up a solemn young thing swinging herself along docks and occasionally the houseboats of her mother's family, nursing the sick goats and reading books on Marco Polo and Captain Cook and Isaac Newton's friend Edmund Halley - until her father died and the money dried up and Paris seemed the only place she could get work.

Jeannette looked a little long at Floréal’s face, but turned and led the way easily enough.

Jeannette’s room was narrower even than most of the garret rooms, on the edge of the building. Because of this, she had the rare privilege of privacy.

“You look like you could use some tea,” Jeannette said shrewdly. She liked teas; there was a shelf full of them above a pile of sewing projects. The little stove in the corner which she shared with the occupant across the wall was stocked with coals on her side; the kettle was already warm on it.

“You’re going to read my tea leaves?” Floréal asked tiredly. She found her trunk quickly: Jeannette’s teacups and saucers were using it as a table.

“Not if it would make me late,” Jeannette said, consulting her battered copy of _Gerard’s Herbal,_ and measuring out a pile of dried herbs. Floréal eyed this with heavy suspicion.

“What’s in that?” she asked, or tried to ask. Her voice was getting raspy. She had been this tired before, she could do it again.

“Mint and nettle,” Jeannette said primly, pouring water over the whole mess. The mint at least smelled bright and clear in the cold morning air. “It’s good for you.”

“It’s disgusting,” Floréal said after the tea had seeped and she’d taken the first sip, but she stood and watched the sun rise over the ragged rooftops and drank it down. She realized she was very thirsty, and it tasted foul but it was good. Something in it brightened her.

She was back in her city, her beloved city. Above the rooftops, all mismatched buildings squeezed together, she could see the morning star rising in the pink dawn. She was still engaged to Monsieur Luc Poulin of Rue du Mer. She was not going to be left barefoot and grim in her mother's cottage on the outskirts of a little Brittany fishing village, and no - Paris had not abandoned her, had not thrown her love and dreams back in her face. Not yet. The little general in her knew that the war was ending, one way or another. All that was left was to win until the time ran out.

“I would druther change my gown before we take the trunk down,” Floréal announced, swigging back the last of the awful tea. Jeannette raised an eyebrow but excused herself to the shared privy at the end of the hall as Floréal stripped down. Even with Jeannette gone for the moment, she only went down to her starched cotton and horse-hair petticoats and chemise, careful that no evidence of what her body had just done showed through the stiff folds. She shrugged her way into her best gown, light blue wool. The sleeves were very full at the shoulder and upper arm but narrowed into tight cuffs around her wrists - this was the new style, as was the fullness of the skirts. The bodice didn’t quite close around her anymore, but she had been prepared for this. She pulled the heavy collar-piece on over the wide, open neckline, obscuring the undone buttons, the stain from her leaking breasts, ready to give milk to a child who, by her mother’s urging, had never tasted hers. She pulled off the headscarf and re-did her hair by memory without the aid of a mirror - the topknot, the pinned up curls framing her face. Some of her hair had fallen out in her hands, as if she were an invalid. She took a deep breath, and drew on her soft little gloves, smoothed the fall of the gown. Fashion propped her up in the face of a tilting universe. This would catch up with her later, but not yet.

“You can keep this,” she said absently to Jeannette as she returned, setting down the headscarf she had worn into the city. She pulled a plain bonnet out of the trunk, tied the ribbon smartly under her chin.

Battle armor thus in place, she turned back to Jeannette, who clapped, only a little sarcastically.

“Quite right,” Jeannette said, stooping for the lunch pail she would take with her for her factory job painting lady's fans; she would not be home until it was dark again. “I’m ready to be off. I think we can carry the trunk down between the two of us.”

Just this one more hurdle, Floréal thought. Down five flights went the trunk with the two girls, Floréal panting behind. 

The landlady, snooping in the foyer, looked especially grim at the sight of Floréal done up in her Sunday best - her gown was the castoff of some lady of high station, and some of the older generation were quite distressed to find that they had trouble telling apart a lady's maid in fine castoffs from a prostitute dressed to ensnare. Floréal was not sure how they found this distinction quite so confusing, but there it was. She might not be admitted again, Floréal thought, for fear that her flashy clothes were meant to attract clients of the wrong kind. But then she remembered that if this worked, she would not be another grisette just a step away from choosing the wrong way to make money. She would become another creature entirely. Something reborn.

Jeannette walked with her to the omnibus’s route and stood next to her for a moment to catch her breath after lugging the heavy trunk. She was an almost-mirror of Floréal, in her gray working-girl dress, her wooden clogs clacking on the cobbles, because they all refused to wear out their one pair of boots before snow flew. She was how Floréal was used to picturing herself.

There was no snow this early in November, but their breaths were gilded, and settled around their faces like lace veils.

Jeannette clasped her shoulder rather like a man would, and with the other hand pressed a little paper packet into her grasp. “More tea,” she said. “Drink as much as you can.”

“What?” Floréal said, “I don’t-”

The morning run of the omnibus pulled up with a roar and a clatter and the musky scent of sweating horses. Jeannette flagged the driver and shoved Floréal’s trunk up with the surprised occupants, one of whom opened his mouth to protest until he saw that it was a young lady in her finespun blue wool mounting the carriage, her chin up and eyes cold.

It was Sophie-Philip, not Floréal, who settled into a seat made open for her, and did not say a word to anyone. Inside her there was roaring grief and triumph, rising, rising, whipped up into a froth in her throat. She held very still while it burned its way through her. She did not let on.

***

The rooms she was shown to by the hotel concierge were rooms, plural. Though still done up in the old empire style they were clean and elegant, if not the height of fashion. She did not see much of them. She fell past the bed curtains and onto a mattress; she slept.

Sophie-Philip awoke to scraping at the grate; a serving-girl was raking out the ashes, but stood quickly and left with her pail when Sophie-Philip stirred in her dark nest of blue wool.

She looked for the baby; she woke up fully, and sat for a moment mulling over the strange new landscape of reality, in which she had been a mother for three days. Like visiting another country for a brief time. She considered, very calmly, that she had just left an infant in the care of an idiot painting student.

A friend too, though.

A knock sounded on the outside door. She stood, pulled down her skirt and straightened her petticoats with quick little jabs of her hand; a vicious pinch and pull here and there, and the wrinkles gave up. Her hair was mashed inside her bonnet; it would have to do.

Her steps were light on the floor, her back straight; this playacting of regality gave her new strength, made her almost want to give in to a grim grin. Sleep had helped. The racehorse had the bit between her teeth again, as Grantaire liked to say.

“Please, come in,” she said. A tanned girl in a mob cap and ill-fitting dress entered and held the door; behind her came Monsieur Luc Poulin.

Sophie-Philip dipped a curtsy. Hers were practiced in dance halls and her friends’ rooms after too much gin, but she was good; Floréal had always been good. They’d never _really_ thought she would do all the things she talked about, her friends, when Floréal demanded that they try the minuet, that they practice their waltz. Well, thought Sophie-Philip, well then.

Luc Poulin gave her a small smile. “Mademoiselle Gaugin,” he said.

“Monsieur Poulin.”

Poulin was not ugly. In fact, Sophie-Philip found him quite handsome. His hair was as black as Grantaire’s but with none of the wild curls; it was straight and neat, impeccably trimmed; he had a carefully curated moustache and beard that suited him. He was older than she, thirty to twenty, nothing really - she would have done much more, dealt with much worse. Had dealt with much worse already, really. Sophie-Philip was of the opinion that there were a lot of Luc Poulins in the world; dapper if a bit shy, prone to some light bragging but generally harmless, fiscally conservative and liberally neutral. But this was the one whom she had chosen, and the one whose eyes followed her across a room, down a street, who had gone through her friends until he found someone who would make him an introduction to her.

She had been flattered, she had been hopeful, he had made his intentions clear - but she had not seen him since June. More importantly, he had not seen _her._ Time for a recovery, she thought. Play this well. Play it so well, so that he is mollified, so he is flattered, or else all of this - the blood and her mother’s pinched face and the secret letters and the missed work; Rach èl's face this morning, his arms taking that little weight from her \- will be for nothing. Make him want you. That is what you are good at. That is what you are good _for._

She looked at him through her lashes. A little nervousness was not hardly acting at all. "I hardly know what to say, M'sieur. Either to express my happiness at you coming to see me so quickly, or your aid in finding me a place to stay upon my return to the city. I must thank you, sir.”

The maid snorted, very quietly. Sophie-Philip felt the tips of her ears heat, felt the stakes.

“The honor is all mine. I was afraid you were going to run off forever,” said Poulin stiffly, but she thought perhaps it was due to lack of practice with affairs of the heart, or perhaps he really had wondered, even with her flirting outrageously in her letters. Poulin paced the little parlor, inspecting the cheap watercolor on the wall. With a start Floréal realized that it was one from the studio where Grantaire worked. She schooled her face into blankness.

“As much as I care for my family, the countryside cannot suit me anywhere as near well as Paris,” Sophie-Philip demurred. "And I had quite a lot to return to."

“Look at your pretty manners,” Poulin said, but he was smiling like she was a delightful little thing. “You needn’t stand at attention, darling. I was impatient, can you understand that?”

She hoped he was still impatient.

Keeping her eyes down, lashes lowered, Sophie-Philip said, “Certainly, m’sieur.”

“I have been so bold as to send my condolences to your mother, for her lost sister,” Poulin said, but his voice was warmer.

“She may yet find some small comfort in them,” Sophie-Philip replied diplomatically. She hadn’t actually seen her mother smile in about ten years, living sister or dead sister.

A pause. The maid, Sophie-Philip noticed, was just watching them, not moving to do anything, like this was some fascinating theater piece. Normally, that would be Floréal, only she was more subtle about eavesdropping and wore her cast-off gowns with much more aplomb.

Only she was not the maid, not today.

“Well, the miasmas of Paris seem to agree with you, Mademoiselle Gauguin,” said Poulin with a small turn of his mouth at the joke.

“The trick's to breathe the air of higher places,” muttered the maid under her breath, so quietly that only Sophie-Philip could possibly have heard. Or at least, she thought it was the maid, for she had not actually been able to detect movement in the girl’s lips. Poulin saw Sophie-Philip’s gaze slip to the side and turned as well to the maid as if he had forgotten she was there. He did not dismiss her, however.

“Oh, she is for you to keep, for whatever you might need. Her name is Thénardier. She’s with the household, really, but I can get along without her for a short time, and I thought you could better employ her services in the meantime,” Poulin said. This easy claim - him on her, her on his house - reassured her. It was a deal they were signing, and the signing was to go on ahead.

Thénardier, though. Was that a familiar name, and from whence did she know it? She could consider it later.

The maid herself looked like she had employed her services on the streets somewhat recently, but Sophie-Philip figured she couldn’t expect Poulin to know how to tell one working girl from another. She couldn’t exactly judge, either; she was a little Talleyrand, not a hypocrite. Even if she had never precisely taken on the mantle of that particular profession, she had lived as a mistress before. Mistressdom, they liked to say, was the barter system. You traded in what you had.

“You are too kind, Monsieur Poulin,” Sophie-Philip said, but kept her eyes on the maid, and was somehow unsurprised when she found Mademoiselle Thénardier was doing the same thing to her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- ok there's a reason this is labelled slow burn; enjolras is around and will show up eventually feeling VERY left out. But hiya, eponine.
> 
> \- being insane, i referenced an 1820s map of Paris for this fic. Things are vaguely correct, whenever ppl walk somewhere. The omnibus was actually not gonna be around for another...4yrs ish? But it's super helpful so we're using it and fudging the routes a bit.
> 
> \- to my eternal frustration, and also grantaire's, no one in Europe had invented a successful baby bottle by 1826. To floreal's frustration, no one has invented ibuprofene either


	3. In which a ball is attended

“Rachèl Grantaire!” boomed a voice from the stairs of Grantaire’s building. A head of  styled brown curls poked through the doorway, and a hand shoved a piece of paper into Grantaire’s horrified face. “I’m supposed to meet a lovely girl -- Jacqueline, I think you know her? -- at this ‘Café Musain’, but I’ve no idea where it is! Help a man in the throes of passion to conquer this infested maze you call a neighborhood.”

Ciprian de Courfeyrac, good man that he was, suddenly registered the look on Grantaire’s face.

“R?” he asked cautiously. The baby chose this moment to break into hopeless, desolate screaming from her place barricaded on the bed. Courfeyrac turned very, very slowly, like a man being faced with a tiger in a jungle.

He stared at the baby and, helpless, so did Grantaire. She writhed and beat her fists weakly, not strong enough yet to lift her head. This was about how the last few nights had gone. Grantaire had a new theory that the sanctity of marriage was a thing parents had come up with when they realized how hard babies were when there were  _ two  _ of you, and wanted to legislate a way to keep a co-parent around indefinitely. De Courfeyrac had no idea that he should be appreciating Grantaire’s newfound philosophizing, and was busy staring between the two occupants of Grantaire’s rooms in growing horror. Grantaire hadn’t looked in a mirror recently, but he guessed the two of them would’ve been quite wonderful as fright costumes at a festival: a baby banshee and a walking corpse.

“Did…did you lose a bet?” asked de Courfeyrac.

“Courfeyrac, if that’s how you think babies come into the world, I can assure you…” Grantaire paused, and in panic fell back on classics, per usual, “that this girl is no stern Athena nor sly Dionysus.”

De Courfeyrac, who had a gentleman’s classical education, no matter if he preferred to deny it, went rather white, but his eyes remained wide and empathetic and wondering. Grantaire mostly felt ill. True dawn appeared to have brought true reality along with it, and he had no desire to face another one till he’d actually gotten either of them some sleep.

“She’s yours?” Courfeyrac breathed. He stared between them, mouth clamped tight around questions, until he suddenly jerked as if some obvious realization had seized him. “Perhaps we should tell Ève-Marie,” de Courfeyrac said, moving towards the door as if he was planning on doing so right away.

“We  _ really  _ should not,” said Grantaire, scrambling up from his place. “What kind of logic is ‘Rachèl Grantaire has a baby in his rooms, let’s invite Ève-Marie Enjolras into the joke’? The last three times we’ve spoken we’ve screamed at each other. We’re Athens and Sparta at war, monsieur, and no escaping it. In which universe is that a sound plan? ”

“In the utopia of fraternity,” de Courfeyrac said, in a way that made it uncertain whether he was joking or entirely serious, but the end result was that he turned away from the door. De Courfeyrac swept off his top hat in distress – a bad sign. “If you won’t allow me to enlist the help of one of our friends, allow me to suggest – forcefully – accepting the aid of another,” de Courfeyrac continued. He plucked up a stick of charcoal as he spoke and fiddled with it absently as he paced Grantaire’s tiny compartments, his eyes on the bed, on the baby. The ancient floorboards protested loudly under his fashionable heeled boots, but Grantaire could barely hear it under the squalling.

Grantaire thought, tiredly, that he should probably take the charcoal away from Courfeyrac before it crumbled under Courfeyrac’s somewhat manic twiddling, but it was Grantaire who looked at his daughter and crumbled himself.

“Another. You mean Monsieur Combeferre? Your friend from the military polytechnique who is somehow also studying medicine?” he asked, sitting down heavily on his piano-less piano stool. De Courfeyrac discovered that the charcoal was leaving smears on his carefully buffed fingernails and hastily set it down. On top of sketches. Grantaire winced. Courfeyrac looked around, then wiped his hand on a spare pair of Grantaire’s socks.

“I mean Monsieur Combeferre,” he confirmed, tossing the stockings back into the corner by the stove where he’d found them.

Barack Combeferre, as far as Grantaire knew him, was kind and good in that way which always left Grantaire feeling politely judged, even as nearly everyone else laughed along at whatever Grantaire had let slip out of his mouth. Yet, Combeferre spoke softly and dressed in pale and sandy colors that were calming to look at. He might as well be thankful that Courfeyrac was giving him a choice. Had any other of the trio -- the holy trifecta of Barack Combeferre, Ciprian de Courfeyrac, and Ève-Marie Enjolras -- walked in on Grantaire mid parenthood, all three would’ve known about it within hours, simply because they saw no logical reason not to tell the others. De Courfeyrac, whether by accident or design, was more on the side of Rousseau than Voltaire, and his first judgment was always feeling. In this case, Grantaire’s feelings. Which were not positive.

Small mercies, thought Grantaire, and went in search of a hat.

“Where can we find your not-a-doctor friend?” Grantaire asked upon his success, and de Courfeyrac visibly brightened with a job to do.

“He’s with Jean Prouvaire this evening, if memory provides,” he exclaimed, jumping to snatch his own hat from where he’d set it dangling off the snout of a cask of wine.

“You remember your friends’ social schedules, but you cannot remember how to find a cafe in my neighborhood?” Grantaire asked.

“I believe my destiny led me to find something rather more important,” de Courfeyrac responded somewhat quellingly. “I will send Jacqueline a note and a pretty present; hopefully all will be well. Now, put on a waistcoat, we needn’t be naked. That nice one of Bahorel’s I know you won last Easter -- sea green with paisley print, here it is! -- and let us be off!”

Grantaire stared. “M’sieur,” he said in a strangled voice. “The baby. I can’t leave the baby.”

Ciprian de Courfeyrac stared right back.

“Damn,” he said finally when he failed to come up with a masterful solution. He studied Grantaire even more carefully. “When did you last quit your rooms, R?”

Grantaire shrugged helplessly.

“I’ve hired a girl in the family on the ground floor to bring up goats milk. Cow’s from the market if their goat isn’t producing, and she gets an extra coin. I expect she’s been cheating me.”

He looked perfectly miserable; the tortured artist lit by a single candle, in the style of perhaps Gerard van Honthorst. “She’s so hungry, Courfeyrac.”

De Courfeyrac looked torn between running for his sort-of-doctor friend Combeferre as quickly as possible and his own desire to try to fix absolutely everything immediately by himself. Grantaire remembered suddenly that de Courfeyrac couldn’t stand it when anyone cried; Floréal had once mentioned that he was considered an easy pushover among the young women who frequented their cafes for exactly this reason.

Grantaire obligingly saved him by stumbling up and going to his little iron stove and the milk that was warming upon it. He poured it into a pottery bowl. Into that bowl he dipped a clean rag, and with some fumbling, forced the cloth into what he thought the vague shape of a woman’s bosom. This he presented to the baby. She had no interest until he substituted a knuckle for her to suck, then quickly switched to the soaked rag.

The baby sucked a bit of rag into her mouth, and well -- it wasn’t the bit Grantaire had carefully constructed as a nipple, but he wasn’t going to attempt to correct her while she suckled so hungrily, staring up at him with wide eyes, tear-glazed and blue-green.

There were times in his previous life when he recalled thinking of himself as monstrous. And now there was this little person with a face criss-crossed with shining tear tracks, whimpering a little around the sorry rag, and he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt so monstrous in twenty-three years. He’d made children cry by accident before; somewhere he still had a sister, and he was certain he’d pinched and teased her, or something, but -- not this one.  _ This  _ one. She should not be crying because he was inept.

“Does she really think that’s a nipple?” asked Courfeyrac with an uncomfortable level of curiosity.

Courfeyrac watched the process, hypnotized, over Grantaire’s shoulder as he re-dipped the rag several times. Finally the baby seemed sleepy. She had tiny eyelashes. Grantaire hadn’t seen them until they were wet and glinting in the light. They were so tiny.

After a few minutes of successful silence, de Courfeyrac took off his hat and punched the air.

He whispered, “Of course we must take her with, if you have no wet nurse or nanny. And how would you,” he assured, all in a whisper. “Do you have a bassinet? Euh, a gypsy sling?”

Grantaire just looked at him with dead eyes until Courfeyrac quailed and cast his eye about the room.

Courfeyrac busied himself staring intensely at the baby, but glanced up as Grantaire approached the bedside and held up a roughly infant-sized peach basket he used for larger trips to the market.

Courfeyrac shrugged helplessly, so Grantaire set his own pillow in the peach basket, then lined it with a sheet. Carefully, carefully, and with no small dose of terror, he lifted the baby and placed in her in the basket, wrapped up in the sheet. Grantaire studied his handiwork and frowned, and proceeded to pile his warmest scarves around her.

“Alright, Grantaire” said de Courfeyrac, placing a friendly hand over Grantaire’s. Grantaire had no idea why that made him want to burst into tears. “Put on that waistcoat. And--” he sniffed-- “maybe change your shirt.”

Grantaire dressed quickly and raised his eyebrows when Courfeyrac handed him his brightest cravat and asked frowningly, “haven’t you got any tighter trousers?”

“Where are we  _ going  _ ?” Grantaire tried to demand. He studied his thighs. “Also, these are fine. I got them at Mme Staub’s.”

A skeptical eyebrow was raised.

“Well, no matter. And Barack Combeferre is with Jean Prouvaire, I told you already,” said Courfeyrac as Grantaire took up the peach basket, baby and all. They went carefully down the steps, Courfeyrac displaying impressive balance as he walked backwards down the steps in high-heeled boots, hands held out towards the basket.

They stepped out onto the street. Grantaire, unused to the fashionable, light greatcoat he wore, shivered and clutched the peach basket closer.

“ _ Sacre nom d’un chien!  _ ” Grantaire half-shouted. “It’s cold, Courfeyrac!”

“Welcome back to the wilderness!” Courfeyrac shouted back. “Never mind. Come along.”

“My hat’s come off,” Grantaire told him.

“Blast,” Courfeyrac said. “Stand there, and hail anyone heading across the river.”

They were still in Grantaire’s neighborhood of course, and close to their regular cafe, the Giovanna. Grantaire thought back to Courfeyrac’s initial reaction, to fetch help. He wondered if some of de Courfeyrac’s friends were at the Giovanna, having a cigar after their supper as if nothing was amiss. Grantaire had gone missing longer than this before; no one would ask a question of it. His particular friends, or at least the men who would still sup with him now that he was no longer quite so frequent in the bottle or at the opium dens, might be there right now. He had the two Louis, both the one Joly and one Lesgles, and a friend from fencing and canne de combat studios, a rough madman called Bahorel. And perhaps Jacqueline, though he had not seen much of her.

It was Louis Joly and Louis Lesgles who were friendly with Courfeyrac and the not-doctor Combeferre and the man called Apollo and whose real name was Enjolras, who was beautiful and terrible and quite disliked Grantaire. Otherwise Grantaire was well sure that his and de Courfeyrac’s social circles would never overlap. He wondered if Enjolras himself was there this night, and if he and de Courfeyrac would’ve been seen and hailed if they had walked closer. He wondered which would be worse -- Enjolras and everyone finding out, or having to tell Enjolras later himself. “Oh no, monsieur Orestes, your Highness Alexander, I cannot meet tonight on account of my mysterious and illegitimate daughter. I’m sure this will not affect your opinion of me.”

_ Daughter,  _ he thought, and laughed weakly as de Courfeyrac replaced his hat and hailed a fiacre and helped him up into a seat.

De Courfeyrac, of course, knew the whereabouts of both his dearest friends, and probably those of anyone he’d ever tipped his hat to, so he directed Grantaire, baby and all, to a dinner party at the Montgolfier family’s grand house.

“Combeferre has been talking about their daughter for months, he shan’t miss tonight for the world, though I may persuade him to miss a bit of it for your, euh, Athena.”

“I did explain it wasn’t  _ my skull  _ she popped out of,” Grantaire said, irresponsibly needling the only man in Paris with an inclination to save him from himself. Then, “Some little Montgolfier lady, then? He woos her seriously?”

“No, do you know, I think he simply finds her intelligent. Mad, I know. Straighten your hat, R, it’s gone off again.”

“You straighten it,” Grantaire huffed, “my hands are full.”

Courfeyrac wisely eyed Grantaire’s death grip on the basket but did not comment that Grantaire could probably hold the weight of baby and peach basket on two fingers if he really tried. He reached over and fixed Grantaire’s hat.

They had come to the tall doors to the grand house’s courtyard, and waited to follow a phaeton through, dodging over icy puddles and into the wide stone courtyard where the horses stabled, and where the two of them awkwardly delivered themselves to the front door and the mercy of a butler unimpressed with their appearance on foot, and perhaps the regained state of Grantaire’s hat.

“Ciprian Courfeyrac, and Grantaire Grantaire,” Courfeyrac announced them to the butler.

“May I take your package, Monsieur Grantaire, Monsieur de Courfeyrac?” the man asked boredly, still flicking glances at the top of Grantaire’s head.

Grantaire twitched back and entire stride, clutching the peach basket to his chest and staring wildly at Courfeyrac who smiled and coldly demurred. They slipped inside, and Grantaire found it thankfully warm.

“I only ever said ‘Courfeyrac’, what’s he doing adding the ‘de’ back in, really!” Courfeyrac muttered, steering Grantaire via a stern grip on his lapel. “Also Grantaire, this greatcoat was quite fashionable last year. You cut a dashing figure if I simply pretend this is Christmas of 1825. I am proud. And oh, I have found someone!”

“This coat is not mine. Or, it wasn’t. Is it Combeferre?” Grantaire asked weakly. He was turning heads, and it wasn’t the greatcoat’s influence.

“No, but a friend indeed!  _ Spasiba, muy  _ Jean!”

“I am quite over Russia, you know. It is all Italy, and perhaps Greece, if it is not the Orient. Though if you have brought me a gift along with Grantaire, I should not mind. His hat placement is quite against the mode; I am in love.”

“As you are always, my Jean,” said de Courfeyrac, smiling indulgently. “Grantaire, I think you are acquainted with Jean Prouvaire. He is a poet, even if he is fifteen and in the lycee, he is better than Thomas Chatterton.”

Prouvaire was a tiny ballerina of a man, with dark hair worn rather long and a red plaid coat cut like something out of the 17th century. Grantaire had met him a few times in the opium dens this year last.

“Yes, we are acquainted,” Grantaire tried. In a stroke of luck, the youth seemed more interested in the poetics of his hat, and might have even overlooked the baby as merely a strange pile of scarves when she thrust her little fist up through her bedclothes.

“A chimera!” cried Jean Prouvaire in delight.

“Not quite,” Grantaire corrected. “May I present my daughter.”

Prouvaire did eyeball him now. “Have you stolen her away? Perhaps you, Grantaire, are a fairy, and she the human child you have replaced with a Changeling?”

Grantaire blinked rapidly, as the boy appeared to say all this in earnest. De Courfeyrac unhelpfully stood to the side looking delighted.

“She is simply mine, I’m afraid, and I’m sure there will be mystery in that enough.”

“Perhaps you are a woman dressed as a man,” Prouvaire postulated.

“Ah well,” de Courfeyrac finally broke in, somewhat hasty, “it is less interesting, but we are hoping Bari will have some idea of how to care for her, be she human or fey.” And as a muttered aside to Grantaire: “Honestly, now he is speaking, all the  _ Contes des Fey  _ I was read as a babe come back to me, and I become suspicious as well of your Athena.”

“Please don’t,” said Grantaire, gazing dazedly around the entrance hall that appeared to be drifting towards a ballroom.

“Bari?” said Prouvaire, “I see you are not come for me after all,” and stuck up his nose with a little smile that seemed almost self-conscious. When this boy found himself, Grantaire thought, he would be a black-eyed beauty, an impossible creature. It seemed he belonged on a stage, or in a phrase; a poet indeed.

“Well, I shall have to find him for you. I saw Monsieur Enjolras’s old friend just a minute ago I’m sure--ah, under the chandelier, with the little man.”

They were towed across, and de Courfeyrac and Jean Prouvaire greeted a woman warmly; Grantaire had to calm a shaking basket and missed her name, but could listen again when she said,

“And this is Monsieur Hector Berlioz,” said a lady. “Came to Paris to study medicine, abandoned it in favor of musical compositions. Cherubini aside, he is the  _ only  _ Parisian composer.”

“Enchanted,” said the young man, who was very small and thin but had a large, owlish face topped with a great shock of red hair, and who additionally appeared rather drunk and glowing with it. Perhaps that was why he let his accent slip so far south of Parisian, and Courfeyrac leapt upon it.

“A Southerner!” he exclaimed, sweeping off his hat in an extravagant bow. “Where, pray tell, do you come from, dear citoyen?”

“Courfeyrac,” Grantaire tried to say, but was hushed. He caught himself glancing at the baby in commiseration and immediately looked about to see if anyone had noticed. Considering that half the room was staring at the scruffy man with the baby in the peach basket, the answer was yes.

“La Côte-Saint-André,” replied the young composer. At the blank looks around him, he sighed and said, “Oh, it is close to that barren piss-hole Grenoble.”

“Ah!” said Courfeyrac. “Dramatic mountain scenery, lots of flooding, hometown of Stendhal. I’m from Provence, which is fortunate. I’d ruin my figure toiling up and down mountains; I prefer to be a bit further south.”

“I have adopted Paris,” said Hector Berlioz, a little shiftily, hoping to keep his reputation.

“Of course! Who could resist her. Say,” added Courfeyrac, “weren’t you the fellow who composed the Waverly overture, after that Englishman’s novels?”

“Oh!” said Prouvaire, leaving Grantaire abandoned entirely, “You mean Mister” – he pronounced this like  _ mystère  _ – “Walter Scott! Are you a fan, Monsieur Berlioz?”

Before the three of them could race off on a Romantic romp of nostalgia and English novelists, another voice cut through the murmur of the crowd.

“Ciprian,” called the voice, and de Courfeyrac jumped. Unlike Grantaire’s, this one was immediately heeded. Barack Combeferre had that effect on people.

De Courfeyrac bowed again to the tipsy young musician, promising to introduce him to a lovely soprano – he meant La Musichetta, Grantaire guessed, that Italian singer someone or another could not shut up about having met – and then very courteously warned him to flee.

“Whyever should I?” smiled Monsieur Berlioz, charmed by Courfeyrac and ensnared by young Prouvaire.

“Because, my dear fellow, the man who calls my name is a true medical student, not the lapsed variety,” explained Courfeyrac as Combeferre cut his way through the crowd. “He will likely want to speak with you of the contents of a corpse’s stomach or the signs of a ruined bladder.” Berlioz, quickly overcome with visions of professors and autopsies floating through his head, fled in the face of the Sciences, and Grantaire felt Combeferre’s gaze fall on him like a very disapproving yet innately calming blanket.

“Explain,” said Combeferre simply. He directed this at Courfeyrac, which Grantaire appreciated. The lady who had introduced their composer friend stayed boldly on, watching their exchange with unguarded amusement. Prouvaire took her arm and began whispering, so Grantaire assumed she was a friend and left it at that.

Courfeyrac made an almost imperceptible gesture with his walking stick, which Combeferre appeared to immediately translate. He considered for a moment.

“Shall we just…” Combeferre said, somewhat vaguely. He was apparently aware of the stares from various parts of the room in a clinical, unselfconscious sort of way, because he took half a step back, waved at Grantaire, de Courfeyrac, Jean, and Jean’s lady friend to follow, and led them all down a short hall and into what appeared to be a very small sitting room.

Grantaire glared around and quickly set the baby and the peach basket firmly in the middle of the fainting couch. It was by far the sturdiest looking piece of furniture in the room, but no one dared to complain as they settled onto the various chairs and padded footstools done up in matching sickly yellow silk.

“We won’t be disturbed here,” Combeferre said, suddenly staring right at Grantaire. Grantaire swallowed.

“How are you so confident about that?” demanded de Courfeyrac. Grantaire did not particularly care, but de Courfeyrac had a laughing glint in his dark eyes and looked truly curious.

“It is a hideous sort of room,” Jean Prouvaire said in vague tones of approval, picking at some of the embroidery on his lady’s dainty and doubtless torturous armchair. Jean himself was perched atop a large pottery urn that he’d fetched from one corner. Grantaire was not sure why he was included in this conference, or the woman, but if he had the trust of both de Courfeyrac and Combeferre, there was not much Grantaire could do.

“A friend once introduced me to this room. It’s the parlor the Montgolfiers use for guests they don’t wish to speak to for long, or for any extended family visits,” explained Combeferre. “I believe she expressed that the furnishing were selected for the purpose.”

“You’re a sly one,” laughed Courfeyrac. “A friend, indeed.”

Combeferre was unrattled.

“Do explain, if you please. Ciprian first.”

“Me!” exclaimed de Courfeyrac. “Why, I have done nothing but good! I was the one who discovered them.”

“You sound like you found a man in your mistress’ bed, Ciprian,” Jean Prouvaire said, kicking his heels.

Grantaire cleared his throat. “Uhm. She is, the baby is-- this is my daughter.”

There was a pause while everyone, Grantaire included, took that in.

“How do you come by that knowledge?” asked Combeferre. He was originally out of Ottoman North Africa somewhere, his French lightly accented with the Arabic slant of his native Empire, but beyond that Grantaire did not know much about him. His dark eyes were empty of any reproof or approval. Grantaire would later realize that Barack Combeferre simply sunk into the role of the impartial scientific observer in times of trouble, or when an test was conducted, or a judgement passed.

“In the usual way,” admitted Grantaire.

“Who is the mother?”

Grantaire made a very fast decision. He could say he did not know, that she had been left at his door with naught but his name on a card. People would believe that of him. He could tell them the name of the mother; she was a grisette soon to be wed to a banker; those social spheres had little hope of overlapping with those at this party, unless some bouzingo poet had courted her before, and cared enough to both remember and make mention of it.

“A woman named Floréal,” Grantaire said, and sealed her secret in.

“Very well,” said Combeferre. “When we she born? She is quite small.”

“She is perhaps a...well, a week or so?”

“You are not sure? Do you have a wet nurse? Or is the mother involved.”

“The mother is not involved. I do not. I… it feels. I cannot just ask a woman off the street. I could perhaps… if I borrowed more from the painting master, perhaps I could afford a wet nurse. If it is what she needs.”

“I hear you are a student of the Baron Antoine Gros,” interjected the young Prouvaire. “Is that true? If so, do tell him to shake off the ghost of David and he will be great again.”

“He did not have much success with that while David was alive; now that as a ghost he is free to become a poltergeist, I hardly think it will be easier,” Grantaire replied.

“The point, however; let us partake in some  _ triage.  _ Biggest worries first. How does she eat?”

“Cow’s milk, in a bowl. I dip a rag in and have her suck on the rag.”

“How much does she drink at once?”

“Not a full bowl as big as this,” Grantaire cupped his hands. “About half.”

“Hm. She will need more.”

“I thought perhaps,” Grantaire said, “Euh, perhaps, if I could put the milk in a bottle with a narrow neck, like that of wine, and stuff the end with rag or cotton.”

Combeferre eyed him speculatively, but said, “Normally, attempts at feeding a babe via a vessel seem to make the babe sicken; perhaps an accumulation of miasma or lack of cleanliness. Perhaps the use of non-human milk, as is often the case. And then there is the prevailing discussion of the effect of the source of the milk on the personality of the child. It is generally understood that one must select carefully one’s wet nurse for an honest personality and godly disposition, for fear of passing on these negative traits to the newborn. What effect a goat or cow might have does not normally enter into the discussion.”

“Remus and Romulus did suckle at the tit of a wolf,” said de Courfeyrac.

“I believe that was rather the point,” said Grantaire. “If it will sicken her, by God, I am not trying to raise a founder of Rome. I prefer she be healthy. The expense is-- well, listen, I can always find a way. I get more work now.”

There was a pause. “Yes, you do, that is true,” said de Courfeyrac, considering. Grantaire did not want to be interrogated on the details of the baby, or how long he had known and been trying to prepare. Prepare, by God! Nothing had prepared him for this. Not Floréal, not his attempts at responsible adulthood, definitely not his  _ own  _ father. It was women who were supposed to orbit so thoroughly around the existence of child. Even among the radical philosophies of his friends, Republican Motherhood was the prevailing theory; the role of the leftist woman was to raise more little leftists. Duties were carefully partitioned. A father was to be distantly proud. He did not feel at all distant. He had already messed it all the way up.

“I have heard of suckling children on goats in the modern era,” admitted Combeferre. “Would you need definitely to put yourself into debt to hire a wet nurse?”

“Yes, but as I’ve said--”

“Then we will try her like this first, R, do not risk debtor’s prison. Barack will examine her regularly, and if we see any problems arise, I am sure we can all of us find a goodly, inexpensive wet nurse.”

Combeferre nodded. “Yes, come by any morning this coming week. I shall be in. And perhaps attempt your idea with a bottle and a thick cloth, like cheesecloth. I will think on the idea; perhaps a vessel for feeding infants in the case of a mother’s death would save lives, and release the poor from dependence on wet nurses, especially in the city where often extended families are not available.”

Grantaire did not care much about the philosophizing, but thanked Barack Combeferre.

“My pleasure, Citizen Grantaire,” said Combeferre, slipping into the revolutionary address that Enjolras had begun to promote as a mark of comradery among the cafe Giovanna group about a year ago. It had probably sounded ridiculous during the Revolution; it certainly still did in 1826. Grantaire’s eyes flicked to Prouvaire, but apparently a youth of fifteen could be trusted.

Their little party broke up shortly thereafter; Jean Prouvaire to speak further with the dark-haired lady, who Grantaire could not remember how anyone knew, Combeferre to some far corner of the ballroom with a knot of gentlemen; de Courfeyrac put a hand on his shoulder and said sympathetically-- “You’ve had quite a shock R. Are you quite ready to go home?”

Grantaire saw de Courfeyrac’s eyes flick minutely towards a man in Montgolfier servants’ livery bearing down on them with champagne, and realized that de Courfeyrac might be afraid he would stay and drink. Stay and drink with the baby!

He felt his smile grow bitter, and shrugged off de Courfeyrac’s arm -- gently, he really did owe de Courfeyrac for this. That his pride was wounded, by the champagne and the night entire, should not factor in; he was surprised by how much pride he still had left. Just enough to choke on, it seemed.

“I know my way back, and the roads are quite safe this early in the evening,” said Grantaire. “Stay and enjoy the party. We will go to see your friend soon enough.”

Courfeyrac’s hand had only slipped down to Grantaire’s sleeve; this he squeezed, “If you are sure…”

Grantaire was sure he needed to leave this press of beautifully dressed Parisians, these crystal chandeliers that left dazzled spots in his eyes, the surprised stares of everyone close to him, for the baby was not clearly visible unless you were practically on top of Grantaire, and unfortunately several people were.

“She will fuss if I do not go now,” Grantaire said. He was not actually sure of this, but the likelihood was high.

De Courfeyrac finally released him and Grantaire darted away before he was given more of a chance to look at Grantaire with wary pity, even if its source was kindness. Grantaire plunged into the crowd. The Montgolfiers appeared to be progressive; the next room he stumbled into had its dancing space cleared for a waltz, the dance the English were only just embracing, to the horror of society mothers. Here on the continent, it was merely part of the rushing new wind after Napoleon’s wars.

Grantaire dodged through the edges of the room and realized that he wasn’t sure which way the exit was. He looked around for a servant, but for once saw none. Through another doorway he spotted Barack Combeferre again. That would work. He fought his way over, but was nearly bowled over by a clutch of young ladies in tears who stormed heedless into his path, one of them crying out,

“Oh, how could you spoil it all Lucien!” And another replied crossly, “Well, you shan’t be able to do that to Hyppolitte, she has done nothing wrong, Camille. It is just wicked, and worse, quite stupid!”

“How could you!” from Camille “I have as much a right to be special friends with Miss Creed as Hyppolitte does; Hyppolitte hasn’t even seen any of her plays in London, and Papa took me to Haymarket last year!”; a fan was snatched and smashed to the floor. Due to the economic lectures Grantaire had occasionally had the misfortune to overhear at the Cafe Giovanna, he knew that fan-painters were paid on average three francs a day, only to have their work smashed on a ballroom floor in the Montgolfier House.

“Excuse me,” said Grantaire. Five girls barely old enough to be out in society whirled on him, and then parted with blushes; he hoped they were so embarrassed at being caught in a tiff to really notice much about him, lest someone become offended at so obvious a guest uninvited by Monsieur Montgolfier. Unfortunately for him, not noticing a strange man with an infant in a basket was not really among the talents of the average fifteen-year-old girl of any class of society. He was unaware that in their gazes, he was becoming a new ballroom legend.

Because of this chaos surrounding his approach, Combeferre did not immediately mark him, and Grantaire was obliged to stand for some minutes trying to get into Combeferre’s line of sight as Combeferre spoke passionately about his plans for the printing press he was attempting to convince these gentlemen to rent him.

Finally seeing Grantaire, he blinked and immediately excused himself, pulling Grantaire away. Grantaire felt oddly like he was being handled, and that Combeferre was suddenly just a touch anxious where before he had been quite calm. He glanced back at the gentlemen, but they looked quite respectable; Grantaire thought perhaps they owned one of the newspapers that had not yet been shut down. But there was nothing odd about that.

He admitted his misdirection and Combeferre smiled and personally saw him out, summoning a footman who he instructed to accompany Rachel Grantaire to his lodgings, safely and quietly. The footman accepted this as if it were an order from the family, to Grantaire’s mild surprise, and was a blessedly silent companion as Grantaire marched solemnly home, the baby now wailing in her basket.

 


	4. In which Republican Motherhood is dabbled in

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hullo, enjolras

A knock sounded at his door a few days later.

The baby had just finished crying her way through another agonizingly slow feeding. Her lungs seemed to have come into their own in the last couple days; she shrieked when he left her on the bed, so loud that for the first time in years he actually worried about the opinions of his neighbors, who’s crying children and baying dogs and the landlady’s mouse-cat in heat he had cursed for ages. Now he was the one trying to steal away down the hall to the privy at the end of it, without anyone seeing him and demanding an explanation for the unholy noise vibrating through the floorboards.

When the knock came, he was back in his rooms, desperately thinking, ‘I have never loved anything this much, also oh sweet god, I’m trapped inside with it.’

Grantaire was expecting anyone from the police come to take the baby away to Monsieur Poulin knocking down his door to avenge his family’s honor, or perhaps de Courfeyrac again, heart too big for his own good and ready to be further entangled in Grantaire’s problems.

Instead however, he opened his battered door to an odd pair: his Haitian drinking friend Louis Joly, and the tiny grissette called Jacqueline, who de Courfeyrac had been looking for that infamous night he discovered Grantaire and the baby and who he had successfully avoided for the last four months.

“Good evening?” he croaked.

“Word has gotten around,” said Louis Joly, a shy grin bright in his face. “We are but the advance guard.”

“We volunteered to bring you back to society, to keep ten dandies from rushing up your steps to hunt for you and your little fox,” translated Jacqueline.

“Much appreciated,” said Grantaire weakly. He assumed de Courfeyrac did in fact count as ten dandies under one tophat. “Do...come in?”

“Not at all, R,” said Joly. “I mean, I apologize, but we have strict orders. We are not to go in, and you are not to stay in. Also, it smells pretty musty in there.”

“What.”

“We’re here to take you out to the Galleries to dine. We can only take a medical emergency as an excuse, and then I’m to attend you while Jacques fetches Barack Combeferre.”

“Alright,” said Grantaire mechanically. “Wait here?”

They nodded at him. He went in search of the peach basket. He put the baby into it. He presented himself at the door once more. At this point, Louis Joly suggested that perhaps his attire should be, euh, neatened. Grantaire was kindly and pointedly told to kneel while Jacqueline re-tied his cravat more expertly than any person who did not wear one daily had any right to do.

They shrugged at the rest of him, and cooed gently at the baby, and then paraded him through the streets to the nearest omnibus route like they were Caesar's generals and he some captured barbarian. He clutched at the peach basket and resisted the urge to bolt for home.

The the _Galeries du Bois_ were not Cafe Giovanna’s familiar snug walls and cheap, smokey sconces. These covered arcades, glass ceilings, columns, and wide courtyards full of shops, cafes, galleries, coffee houses, bookshops, antiques emporiums, with the Comédie Française in one corner of the main square, had survived the Revolution, survived Napoleon, and were now weathering the Bourbons with bored equanimity. It was early enough still that the prostitutes were at a minimum, though fire-eaters were crowding the front steps as they passed. The Galleries were not about having a quiet evening. It was suppertime, and everything smelled like the perfume shop near the entrance and frying fat and wine. After living hermit-like in his apartment, even a fairly standard night at the Galleries seemed like a raging festival.

Louis Joly led the way thanks to his height, and Jacqueline was the rear guard, happy to employ her elbows when necessary. Grantaire felt oddly embarrassed. These were two people he drank with, but otherwise did not know so well. He felt like he was imposing on their fun with his… everything, really. The rest of his life. But they had knocked; what else to do?

They led him to a restaurant populated with a press of people fresh from the cheapest balcony seats of the latest show at the Comédie Française, chatting excitedly, though they cared less for the show than for the fashion on show of the members of nobility in attendance. In the course of their progress from door to table, Grantaire learned that the Dukes of Angouleme _and_ Orleans had been there, on opposite sides of the theatre, and spent their time glaring at each other and ignoring the stage, and that even the Duchess of Berry was there, a rare public appearance, and in a theatre no less! Even when her husband, the King’s son, had been assassinated at the opera six years ago! And my, her crepe and cream silk evening gown had been lovely, but her hat had been fashionable in the extreme.

“Grantaire!” shouted someone, “Joly, Jacques -- over here. Rachèl Grantaire my friend, is it quite true?”

This from the other Louis, Lesgles, who was waving them forcefully to three tables jammed together, populated by a strange convergence of social circles. De Courfeyrac was there, and Jean Prouvaire, who somehow seemed to know a bear of a man called Bahorel from Grantaire’s canne de combat practice studio, along with another grisette Grantaire did not know. And near the ‘head’ of the long collection of tables, sat the council of three -- Barack Combeferre, Ciprian de Courfeyrac, and a blond, severe looking young man called Ève-Marie Enjolras, who likely had only come because his two friends had brought him, and hopefully had been let in on the surprise already.

At Louis Lesgles’s shout, absolutely everyone at the table turned to gawk.

Grantaire, in a perpetual state of exhaustion near tears, sat down in the nearest seat, shoved the baby’s basket on the table while everyone scrambled to save their coffee-cups, and submitted himself to their rabid scrutiny.

Grantaire thought that he was unprepared. When three different people shouted, in various tones, “Oh my, what’s her name?” he realized just how sunk he was.

“I’m...deciding?” Grantaire said, weakly. He saw, from the corner of his eye, Enjolras shoot him an unimpressed look. Grantaire knew he was unconvincing, there was no need to be an ass about it, he thought.

While he was distracted, the table decided to take some of his work off his hands.

“Don’t call her anything that could become Gigi,” Jacques was saying, and de Courfeyrac laughed and set a flirtatious hand on her sleeve.

“So says Jacques. Maybe something greek, like Hyppolite?”

“Sappho?” suggested Jean Prouvaire from behind a book. De Courfeyrac got up, perhaps to fetch a serving girl for their table.

“Perhaps not,” someone said delicately.

Grantaire put his head down. He felt sick, like he’d felt when he first had stopped drinking quite so much, and he’d been sick all the time.

“A modern name?” Jean Prouvaire was saying, “I’m afraid I’m not sure, but I have always liked Melanie.”

“Not Mélanie!” Grantaire exclaimed, feeling suddenly exposed, angry, exhausted, and put out that they’d all seen fit to drag his sorry carcass out into public to see it. “You’re a bunch of lawyerlings and you’ve never studied your Latin! Mélanie is just a linguistic stumble off from le mélancholie. It’s the –cholie that means ‘bile’, but melan on its own means black, darkness, a place without light. Don’t. Don’t name her that.”

“It’s normally taken to mean ‘black of hair’,” Jean said quietly. Grantaire had maybe hurt his feelings. He was so young, so fifteen. “That is all I meant. But of course you’re right; etymology is deeply important to the soul.” He gestured to himself vaguely, or maybe to his embroidered waistcoat.

De Courfeyrac had been making his way back towards them from the moment Grantaire had raised his voice. He reached them then, a serving girl in his wake with plates of cheeses balanced on her arms and bottles of wine tucked under her giant gigot sleeves.

He quickly took in the scene and prescribed some medicinal chaos, in the form of a sweeping bow to the baby which ended with two flamboyant _bisous_ about a foot from the baby’s face – she gurgled in what might’ve been appreciation – and the wine bottles magically in Courfeyrac’s hands, to the mixed relief and dismay of their serving girl.

“Hello, dear Citizen,” Courfeyrac chirped at the baby, which brought up second volly of name suggestions which were in turn shot down with a good deal more joviality than Grantaire had used.

“Citoyen!” boomed Bahorel. “She is a ward of the vanguard of the Rép—“ at a warning look from Combeferre he decided not to loudly voice illegal sentiments in the Galleries, and instead did so quietly, “of the state, adopted by the true lovers of the state, daughter of Patria!”

Combeferre’s face continued to express a strange mixture of discomfort and pride.

Joly, who at the same moment had managed to work the cork and seal off of the first bottle of wine, cheered and took a long swallow.

“Heathen,” Louis Lesgles told him affectionately, producing some glasses.

“Um,” said Grantaire, “actually.” A glance at Enjolras showed that he looked equally pained at the conflation of Grantaire and their beloved Spirit of the Nation, but also worryingly intrigued, presumably at the idea of naming Grantaire’s daughter Citizen.

“Attendes Bahorel, didn’t you just quote the beginning of that speech Enjolras made last Friday, about that new bloke – what was his name? The angry one, the factory worker.”

Bahorel made a sitting bow to Enjolras in a ridiculous parody of Courfeyrac’s earlier elegant number. “I imitate the master only to learn,” he said. “It’s the purest form of Romantic mimesis; a study and perfection of nature.”

“Aristotle would rejoice,” Combeferre said dryly.

“Aristotle is not Romantic!” Jean Prouvaire protested.

“That worker - his name started with an F, I think?” put in Lesgles, who was industriously pouring wine for everyone. Grantaire snatched up a glass with no little desperation.

“Oh, it must have been Filipowicz. I’m sure he was Polish,” said Jehan serenely, sipping his wine. No, that was Grantaire’s wine. He made a small sound of frustration and reached for another glass.

“But listen Bahorel!” said Lesgles suddenly, “you would have us call her Citizen as a prénom, and Grantaire as her surname? Thus: Citoyen Grantaire”

There was a lull of silence as everyone eyed each other with the awkward realization that this was, in fact, what Enjolras in particular and their group in general called Grantaire himself. Though, Grantaire would’ve liked to point out, he had never referred to himself in such a manner.

“Well,” said someone slowly, “I suppose we couldn’t call her Rousseau.”

“Rousseau!” cried Joly, “How could you! I’m a Saint-Simonian and on the side of Voltaire anyhow. That is a terribly tasteless joke.”

“But very tasteful wine. Grantaire, God in Heaven, where is your glass?”

“Ah, it’s a sad day when R is better informed of names than we are. He calls himself by a single letter!”

“Well, what letter shall she be? C - say - for Citoyen?”

A man with his little proper wife at the next table leaned over and muttered, “Some of us fought with Napoleon, you know. Some of us know what France stands for.”

There were a few swift grins around the circle, though Combeferre remained stern, and Grantaire too.

Laughter, and someone said “No see, what month was she born in?”

“Euh,” said Grantaire, who was not honestly so sure. The last of October or the first of November? All Hallows or All Saints?

“She is no more than a week old,” Combeferre said, unable to help himself when it came to trivia.

“Then it is the month of Frimaire!” laughed Lesgles. “And her mother you say is called Floréal, to add to the laugh of it! Perhaps she will be a frosty beauty of Paris.”

A real chill went down Grantaire’s spine. His little joke - oh, he’d thought nothing of it, his little Republican joke of Floréal - the middle month of Springtime on the Revolution’s old calendar. Just a silly, pretty name to call someone he claimed was a mistress to his friends, but was more a friend than his friends. Though the baby seemed to have brought any possible friends out en masse.

“Frimaire is out of the question,” he said gruffly, which was maybe just as well because Courfeyrac was eyeing the couple who were glaring in their direction with the look of a man who hadn’t had occasion to fight a police officer in more than a month.

“Alright, we do this by the letter then,” said Louis Lesgles, contemplative. He stroked his beard.

“I think it must be “A”,” Louis Joly told him. “She is so little, just beginning. So she must start at the start, as it were.”

“What name starts with A, though?” Louis Lesgles asked. “Men, suggestions?”

“Astrid” Jean Prouvaire said, too promptly.

“Euh, Alhertine?” said Combeferre, who had three half brothers named Muhammed, and only knew French women’s names from reading histories in his spare time.

“Afrodille,” said Courfeyrac.

“I’m not naming her buttercup, Courfeyrac.”

“It’s daffodile!”

“Alfhild,” Jean said. “It means “battle of the elves’”.

“Azalaïs?” tried Combeferre. “Ève-Marie, do you know any? I think Ciprian is just listing mistresses.”

“I don’t kiss and tell, Combeferre,” said Courfeyrac, shocked. It happened that his gesture of intense affront spilled a bit of Grantaire’s wine onto the trousers of the man at the table next to theirs, causing him and his wife to finally get up and leave.

“Aslaug,” said Jean, with certainty.

Grantaire despaired, in a general sort of way. It was a blanket despair that covered the fate of this wine glass, the fate of his baby’s name, and the likelihood of all of his friends being arrested or banished to Guernsey for loud Republican views in the Galeries du Bois.

Enjolras had been watching the couple leave, but turned back in his seat and addressed Combeferre’s plea.

“Ah, well -- Aurore, or Amantine?”

“Those actually aren’t terrible,” Joly said slowly. “What’s is their meaning, Combeferre?”

“‘Aurore’ is Latin-derived from _aurius,_ meaning golden. Historically, it is the name of the goddess of dawn in the Roman, if not the Greek, pagan belief. It’s been made popular by Perrault’s _Contes de Fey,_ in which Aurore is a princess who is bewitched into an eternal sleep.”

“And Amantine?”

“Beloved, I believe,” Combeferre said, “Perhaps ‘little beloved’”.

Enjolras, having done his duty of input, had tuned the rest of them out and was talking in low tones with de Courfeyrac. Jean had pulled out his copy of _Bug-Jargal_ and was leaving through it for inspiration.

Grantaire watched Ève-Marie idly, thinking. Aurore from aurius; it sounded a more likely name for some offspring of Ève-Marie’s than one of his. Floréal and her friends called him “Apollo” for his aloofness, and his classic profile and golden hair. Aurore would be beautiful, and he really didn’t need any more suggestions from a book where the main character was, in fact, called Bug-Jargal, but - Amantine seemed nice, and simple, and the correct sentiment. Not something grand, but a shield, one a daughter without a mother would need: ‘little loved one’. That was a name he would give.

“Less terrible, yes, I’m sure that is the letter of reference her name should come with,” he said, but settled the baby in the crook of his arm and rocked her in time with his syllables as he sounded out -- “Ah! Mahn! Teen!”

Her tongue poked out and she drooled a little.

“I’ve never witnessed a naming before,” Jean said thoughtfully, staring at them with interest, Bug-Jargal now discarded. Joly was picking through it with the deep discomfort of someone whose parents actually knew quite a bit about the Haitian slave revolt due to some direct involvement on the part of his uncles. “It’s quite a holy thing, I think.”

Enjolras alone looked contemplative and withdrawn. Normally when he sat back and let the conversation run its course, he would be watching his friends debate the merit of everything from the social ramifications of steam trains to the latest cut of trousers at Madame Staub’s. This evening, however, he was lost in his own contemplations

Grantaire assumed these had nothing to do with himself or the baby, and everything to do with, for instance, Enjolras’s meetings with increasingly extreme leftist groups.

The knock on his door the next evening proved him wrong entirely.

As it went, Enjolras was let into the building by the portress roughly three hours into the baby’s fit of crying. Grantaire could hardly deal with the misery of it; someone so little couldn’t help but feel and express her crushing unhappiness, and Grantaire himself was crying by the second hour under the force of it. When Enjolras finally let himself in, humiliation just added to the fumes of desperate and unending melancholy.

“I blew out the candle!” Grantaire wailed at Enjolras in what was supposed to be some sort of explanation, or defense of his situation, but came out more as a plea, “I think that’s why she’s crying. I lit it again, I lit three more, but I don’t have any more candles right now. What else do you want me to do?” He pulled his hands through his black curls, roughly, like he was trying to make it hurt.

“You can’t handle this,” Enjolras said after a pause, tall and stiff in the doorway. “It’s killing you to do it.”

Grantaire laughed hollowly. The dawn spreading pink and orange through the streets, through the shutters, behind Enjolras’s slim and proud shoulders laughed right back at him.

“I should have been born a woman,” Grantaire said, sitting down hard on his piano stool. He wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by that; whether it was in a general sense something he had always felt, or whether he meant that he knew women did this, all the time, all their lives. Grantaire had always thought there was a sort of magic around women, different than the magic around men, different than the magic around people who drifted between the two, like the tousle-haired golden youths of Early Renaissance oil paintings. He saw the shades of it so clearly when he painted a face. When he painted himself, everything blurred; the feminine, the masculine; the paints.

“I still speak to some of my relatives. I am an eldest son, _fils ainé_. The family would have the means, and at least would eagerly take in a child, should I ask it of them, and definitely should I claim it as mine.”

It took Grantaire a few precious seconds to understand what he was hearing.

“Should you claim her as your own bastard, you mean?” said Grantaire. He found himself speaking with an odd soft quality to his words. It is not a true softness, but distant thunder, or the sound of a fight muffled by thick cellar walls, but heading closer all the time. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “She is Floréal’s.”

Enjolras lifted an imperial hand, long fingers luminously pale in the dusky light, but dropped it. “The offer is there,” he said stiffly.

Grantaire felt a strange numbness in his fingers and a sharpness in his mind. He actually had to remind himself that Enjolras was a friend of friends, that he had just offered to take Grantaire’s bastard as his own and meant it as a favor. “She is Floréal’s, and she is mine, Enjolras. As I’m not engaged to a banker, Amantine is here.” The forceful emotion quieted. He rubbed his eyes. His face and hands smelled of sweat and woodsmoke and spit up.

“You’re - you’re calling her Amantine, then?” asked Enjolras, a strange catch in his tone. Grantaire ignored it.

“You would take her away, whisk her off like the baby Zeus to be cared for by nymphs and centaurs.” He looked up, dark eyes barbaric under his heavy brow. “Do you think, dear Enjolras, that I am in the habit of eating my young?”

“I would never be so crass. I am offering a favor,” said Enjolras, somehow even stiffer and more uncomfortable than before. This is a man on unknown ground, thought Grantaire. I might laugh if it didn’t make two of us, and if he wasn’t as pretty as the dawn behind him.

A part of him, though, did acknowledge the incomprehensible breadth of what Enjolras was offering. To claim in front of his entire family to have fathered a bastard abandoned by its mother; to lie and debase himself in front of relatives he disdained for those exact qualities. It was an offer so generous that Grantaire the wretch could not comprehend the scope of it. Yet, the new man, Grantaire the father, could never appreciate it.

“You would foist my daughter off on your high born relatives. And what then? What would become of her when you and everyone raise up your glorious second Republic? I have heard a man in the street compare you to Saint-Just--”

“Saint-Just? Crisse, who said that?” demanded Enjolras. Grantaire could not tell if he was nervous or proud. If he had any damned sense he would be terrified.

“--Which is to my mind just another reason the Classics are superior to the contemporary.The blood on Apollo’s hands is old and forgotten; that of Saint-Just much less so. When you march like our fathers did – and I say ‘fathers’ as the fathers of France, for I doubt either of our fathers were in the streets, for one reason or another – when you sweep Paris with your own holy fire—“

“You will be there,” interrupted Enjolras, his eyes glowing, and this was not the point Grantaire was trying to make.

“I will be with my _daughter_ ,” Grantaire interrupted before Enjolras could take Grantaire’s oration and twist it to become his own. His voice cracked on the final word, but he ignored it, and the way Enjolras had jolted and stared, and plowed on. “Or if you have your way, I will be searching for my daughter, left in the hands of the very people you are ready to burn off the face of this world. Amantine, saved a life as the daughter of a banker, nearly _noblesse_ instead. Should she grow up, God save us all, into a little politico, or a writer of influence like Madame de Staël or Madame du Châtelet but for the side of the ultra-royalists, what then?”

“She’s an infant in cradle!” scoffed Enjolras, sweeping a hand to the bed where Amantine watched with wide and fretful eyes.

“As were you, Apollo! Once, in a town I do not know, far from here. If the ancients were wise it was because they knew even gods can be born small. No, Enjolras, _c’est l’age modern, c’est l’age de la mélancholie_ , the ‘lost century’ if you’re feeling dramatic - and I am - and you are the only unstoppable force I know of. If she must live as a painter’s daughter, at least she must be on your side. There are very few things I know for certain, and even fewer places to which I would entrust Amantine’s safety, but I am one and you are one and your family is not.”

Enjolras looked pained, but Grantaire was out of breath and even more out of spirit. It was as if those words had been a breath he’d been holding in while treading water, and now that he’d let them out there was no buoyancy in his lungs and he sank. If Grantaire had so insulted another of the group, such as hotheaded Courfeyrac, they would be on the floor and punching each other by now. Though, he hadn’t quite ended as rudely as he’d began. Or rather, he’d been rude in a different way, perhaps. Grantaire was often defeated by his own mind.

“I do not hate my family,” Enjolras finally said.

“No!” Grantaire threw his head back to look at the ceiling and laugh. His hair was wild and shaggy enough that it nearly reached his shoulders. His face was a savage thing. “You do not care about them enough to hate them; it is an everyday failing of yours.” He sighed, cast his eyes back to the bed where Amantine was frowning and growing red, which he’d come to understand meant something new was amiss, or she was simply soiling herself in the middle of her father’s heated argument with the man who wanted to be her savior.

Humanity stopped for no ideal, Grantaire thought, and crossed the room to pick her up and attempt to help along whichever bodily function she was currently attempting. He lifted her as carefully as he could, one hand on her rump and the other cupping the back of her head. She looked hilariously confused at the change of perspective from her place on Grantaire’s shoulder. He patted her back as hard as he dared, feeling Enjolras’s eyes on him. He was deeply, profoundly relieved when this produced a satisfied burp and no other calamity.

“I’m just not sure you should be confined to your rooms, attempting to play the role of Republican motherhood,” Enjolras said, in what Grantaire considered to be worrisome levels of seriousness.

“Enjolras,” said Grantaire, equally seriously. “I am burping the baby while arguing with you about your politics. There is no purer form of Republican Motherhood. Now, see yourself out if you do not believe me, or alternatively in the case that you are sensitive to the sight of vomit. Otherwise, please hand me that rag drying by the stove before I have to wash another – oh, perfect timing. Did she get you?”

Enjolras assured him that no, there was no baby vomit on his gloves.

“Pity,” said Grantaire, “You could have gotten a taste of Republican Motherhood. Well, there will be other chances.”

Enjolras had become even more stiff, but still gamely raised an eyebrow and said “Will there?”

Grantaire smiled in a way he fancied might have been witty and enigmatic, had he been for one, anyone but himself, and for another, not sleepless and splattered in baby vomit.

Enjolras, to Grantaire’s ultimate surprise, returned the smile and saw himself out.

Grantaire felt rather like he’d just survived an earthquake.

There was silence in Grantaire’s rooms. The morning light was creeping through the shutters, and candles burned brightly all over the room. Grantaire felt like a fool, but a triumphant fool. He felt, too, that he could ride that one smile for years.

Grantaire pulled the baby away from his shoulder. She blew a small bubble of spit up at him and blinked, slow and long.

“I know I’m not a Maman,” Grantaire said, trying to figure out how to wipe at such a tiny mouth. “I know you miss your Maman.”

The baby girl stared solemnly at him. He wished she would laugh.

“And Maman will visit, when she can. But we have to be careful, and Maman has to take care of herself, so it will be you and me, little sea-eyes. Okay? You and me.”

He thought that he was crying. He brought the warm little body back to his chest, tucked her under his chin like a violin, like something precious. There was a tight warm feeling, like a letter on paper made from orange-hot embers folding up tight in his chest. He could feel her little cheek against his collarbone, her mouth move just a little.

“I wasn’t born a Maman, little sea-eyes. Maybe I should have been. I think I would have done less damage that way. And I am an R, _un aire_ , not _un père_ , but at least we have some bread here, sea-eyes, and milk rags for you, and it’s warm inside.”

The baby wriggled against his chest and Grantaire sighed, but his heart didn’t sink like it had before Enjolras had come. It was as if Enjolras had done him a favor, in challenging him when he felt his most weak, and proving to Grantaire that he hadn’t given up yet. How selfish of Enjolras, to force Grantaire to examine himself.

Grantaire didn’t want to look too closely at that piece of intuition. Fortunately, he was newly a parent, and Amantine was still squirming. He pulled her away from his chest, afraid suddenly that she couldn’t breathe. She seemed fine, though her head tipped back alarmingly before Grantaire remembered, heart pounding, to hold up her skull.

“Watch your head,” he scolded in a whisper, wondering if babies were really supposed to flop like that. Amantine ignored him and turned as best she could to stare at the candle on his desk. She stopped blowing spit bubbles and stared with what Grantaire thought was shocking intensity at a single wax taper with a long bright flame at the top. Grantaire bought good candles so that he could work into the night on the red chalk lines of an _esquisse_ on primed canvas, though he rarely dared to do more than underdrawings or colorless studies without daylight.

Something hurt in Grantaire’s throat. He watched the baby stare at the dancing flame and felt as he assumed people were supposed to feel when they walked into a grand cathedral.

“Do you like the light, Amantine?” he asked in barely a whisper, rocking her just a little in his lap like he’d seen mothers do in doorways all over Paris, like he’d done with his sister so long ago it was a shade of a memory. But this baby was real and alive and so soft and warm, her wide eyes fixed on the candle flame.

He smoothed a shaking hand over her head and said, “Oh, sea-eyes, I know how you feel.”

But then Amantine looked up at Grantaire, at his face or maybe the sound of his voice or the warmth of his hands. And she looked up at him just the way she’d watched the lit candle, the way an adoring crowd watched Enjolras. Helpless, Grantaire rocked her slowly, in a room alight with rows of candles, even as the dawn filled up the cracks around the shutters with light.

***

The last time they’d been in bed together he’d laid out next to her, his thighs trembling, and ran his fingers through the dark hair above her cunt. Floréal had stretched out like a queen on her pillows in the little attic room and watched him lazily.

“Sometimes I wish you were some golden-haired beauty,” Grantaire had told her, grinning a little against her thigh. He’d only meant to tease, and maybe be a little mean. To Floréal it was almost a rule that they didn’t have to be nice to each other, and she proved this by beginning to laugh.

He hadn’t been trying to be funny. Maybe if he were honest (and if Floréal’s rule was “no niceties”, Grantaire’s was” no honesty”) he would admit that he’d been trying to distract himself from the dark and painful shard of something that had grown in his chest over the past few months.

Yet, he thought this through, or carefully didn’t think it through, and at the end of the mental circus tricks Floréal was still laughing, so hard, and she looked right into his eyes to do it. She laughed and laughed, her head thrown back against her pillow, the long line of her throat exposed to the musty attic light of her garret room, her naked body convulsing with it, the fat on her thighs and stomach trembling. Grantaire thought she would actually laugh herself sick, and when she didn’t the only way to mend his wounded pride was for Floréal to roll them over and wrap her hand around his prick again. She was straddling him, and when she deemed him hard enough to please her she sunk down onto his cock and let him gather her up in his lap with desperate hands. Floréal rocked her hips and took, and took, and took.

And the pleasure came whether Grantaire wanted it or not.

Floréal, for her part, only realized their mistake a month later. In her defense, Grantaire was incontinent more often than not.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- goddamn, she could've been Auslaug
> 
> \- "Republican Motherhood" was an actual Thing, because the Revolution and later 19th century iterations kinda sucked at including women directly, which tends to be a downfall factor across history. Basically the concept is that the women of the revolutionaries are in charge of teaching the next generation the values of republicanism (aka radical liberalism) buuut that's it.
> 
> \- I'd love to make a wine mom joke abt Grantaire but he's trying to get clean so it's a no-go
> 
> @astronicht on twitter


	5. In which there is a marriage

Grantaire woke and it was evening, and Amantine was fussing. She was in the center of his rumpled bed, surrounded by pillows, swaddled in nothing more than an old pair of socks he’d torn up as rags for her. For once he didn’t feel numb or ashamed, waking when the Latin Quarter was lighting its candles. He felt oddly strong, an exhausted strength, like he’d just finished a bout of canne de combat, or outlasted a fever.

Like he’d just finished fighting with Enjolras. And perhaps had won? That steadiness from throwing himself at Enjolras and understanding what he wanted, that he did not want to give up on her, that he did not secretly want to take any out given him-- he had not realized how afraid of that he was.

So now it was time to wake up from the strange dream, and make this his life.

Carefully, he wrapped Amantine in the bedsheets and tucked a pillow into the peach basket cradle, then tucked her on top, gentle like he was handling gunpowder over a flame, like he was using a brush with just two hairs at its tip, for the details of a face.

He fed her and burped her. They slept more; they woke. She had the milk, he had the cheese. The girl from downstairs knocked, left hot goat’s milk in her wake and took the cut coin he left under the bucket. Grantaire awoke again to bells, clear suddenly now that Enjolras had knocked the roaring out of his ears. The night was not the devil; the day was not the devil.

He bundled her up at some hour or the other, and went to call on the not-doctor, Barack Combeferre.

Grantaire lived in the Faubourg St Germain, in the odd area between grand houses and palaces to the West and the wretched slums that surrounded the Ile du Palais and Notre Dame. Barack Combeferre’s address led Grantaire across the river to the north bank. For the first time he thought of how Amantine would grow, how she had never seen, this little thing just two weeks old, more of Paris than the narrow street he lived on, sandwiched between the Rue de Seine and Rue Dauphine - with the exception of that first party. She had never crossed the river; from her place reclining in the basket, perhaps all she knew of her city was its sky, and the eaves of the buildings, and the underside of Grantaire’s chin. She had never seen a Cathedral’s painted ceiling; she had never heard a poem, or tasted fresh pork crackling. She did not know any plays or stories, she knew no names of gods.

It was only logical; it floored him.

So he took her across the river, telling her all the while where they were, the names people had wedged in the stones of Paris. They took the busier roads instead of the small tangled ones he usually favored on his home turf, though really, who had wandered this city as well as Grantaire, with no one but the wine to delight with him, sorrow with him, at the immense and crumbling beauty of it? It was all his, really. And suddenly all that was his was an inheritance, and suddenly that had meaning.

Paris had been built and rebuilt beyond the scale of men; one might think, should the city empty out, that dragons lived in the palaces and none but rats in the slum.

He hefted her onto the heavy traffic of Pont Neuf, and from that bridge stood for a moment against the tide of foot traffic to point out the long wall of the Louvre to the left along the far bank. To their right, the tangled medieval slums of the _Ile du Palais_ crowded right up to the haunches of Notre Dame cathedral, currently half-swathed in scaffolding for renovations.

“They’re adding more gargoyles, my opium friend Jean tells me,” Grantaire murmured to his basket.

He could not stop for long; the crowd pushed them onward, and omnibuses whipped past inches away, hurrying along their route in a clatter of hooves and snorting horses. Grantaire crowded against the side wall and held Amantine close. Above them, seagulls swooped and yelled, and from behind, Notre Dame chimed out, slow and ponderous, that it was four in the afternoon.

Grantaire could walk his way across the entire city, given a night and free time and the surging feeling of the city around him. It stunk, it screamed, its wind and light, sharp autumn bursts of rain drove right into his soul and filled him up.

They spilled with the rest of the crowd onto the Right Bank, skirting away from the Louvre and the Tuileries Palace - the gardens of which, Grantaire thought, were where this all started.

“I’ll show you later,” he said, and thought of the future. Thought of one of those Sundays when the Louvre’s collection was open to the people, when he might hold a little girl’s hand and guide her through the press, put her on his shoulders and let her take in whole walls of paintings, wedged together on the wall tight as paving stones. Tell her their stories; how that one and that one were plundered by Napoleon; how some went back after Waterloo, but you could still see Veronese’s sprawling Wedding Feast at Cana, with Jesus in a crowd of too-perfect Renaissance revelers under a powdery blue sky, turning water into wine.

Barack Combeferre lived closer to the theatres than Grantaire would’ve expected for a solemn-seeming young man. He did keep rather raucous friends, however, so maybe there was something there that Grantaire didn’t know about. He barely knew Barack, really. But Ève-Marie trusted him, and Grantaire was used to thinking of Ève-Marie as an easy test.

Combeferre was a bit past the _Halles_ , nearish, Grantaire reckoned, to St. Leu, and just to the left of the Jewish quarter.

The building’s concierge was a bit better than Grantaire’s, because he made Grantaire wait while he climbed up to find Combeferre and inquire, Grantaire assumed, whether he was expecting a strange man and a possibly kidnapped infant. They only waited a bit before the man stumped back down and said that Monsieur Combeferre would be delighted to see them, and led Grantaire up to a third floor set of rooms.

Inside, the rooms were cold and bright, the shutters thrown open to the weak afternoon sun. Combeferre’s parlor appeared to actually be a workshop of some sort, though Grantaire had no idea what his hobbies might be. In the middle of the room was a long table onto which thermometers were set out at even intervals. The man himself was at the window, fiddling with a glass prism which he appeared to be trying to clamp into place; he swore gently when it slipped, and threw a brief, bright rainbow across the table before it managed to flash up and blind Grantaire.

“Damn!” he said, stumbling back.

Barack Combeferre startled, and abandoned the prism on the sill. “I apologize!” he said quickly. “I thought I might have a minute; I didn’t hear the door. Euh, I am glad you have come. For a medical examination?”

“Yes, if you will. She’s--”

“Well first, help me with this.”

Obligingly, Grantaire set down the peach basket and consigned Amantine to the floor.

Combeferre said something disparaging to the prism in what Grantaire thought was probably Arabic and accepted Grantaire’s help in securing it on the window ledge, saved from a long fall to the street below by two thin strings Grantaire deftly knotted about it.

Barack Combeferre smiled at him and said, “You really could be a surgeon, with those steady hands.” When he smiled Grantaire realized how young he was, close to Grantaire’s age. His seriousness and perhaps his accent made him seem older.

“Or a seamstress,” Grantaire mumbled, because he had spent a lot of time knotting off for Floreal, who gleefully berated him for his clumsiness.

The prism was now snug in the window and throwing a rainbow onto the wide wood table, which looked much scuffed and had a few burn marks that Grantaire squinted at curiously.

“Hmm,” said Barack Combeferre. He carefully aligned each thermometer on the table in the middle of each band of color. Grantaire watched his hands, dusty tan like Grantaire’s, and the way they took on the deep tones of each color of light, like they were in a cathedral and under the stained glass. He almost wondered what this experiment was, but didn’t ask. He was sure he wouldn’t understand the answer.

“So, I’ll examine both the infant and when possible, the mother,” Barack Combeferre said suddenly, and Grantaire realized that they had jumped to another end of the conversation.

“Euh,” said Grantaire. “Well, Amantine’s here now, so.”

“Right, well, I shall examine Amantine for signs of illness or deformities, though I am glad that she seems healthy and can cry quite loudly.”

There was another smile, but Grantaire just winced, even though the baby was quiet now, remembering the Montgolfier ball, and all the scandalized young society ladies.

“There is another thing,” Combeferre said slowly. “Besides the examination, I mean. Have you heard of Thomas Dimsdale, or early inoculation?”

Grantaire frowned. “Yes,” he said, “Exposing children to a small sample of a disease via a scrape or a needle under the skin. Louis Joly finds it terrifying.”

A ghost of a frown flitted across Combeferre’s face. “But what do you think?”

“I think I should listen to what my doctor has to say about it before I make a decision,” Grantaire said pointedly. Combeferre blinked for a moment.

“Oh, you mean me,” he said finally. “You don’t employ your own doctor, Grantaire? You must be careful with yourself.”

Grantaire shrugged, uncomfortable.

“I’m not actually a doctor, Grantaire,” Combeferre said with a twist of his mouth. “I would like to be, but my father sent me to France for a military career. I am at the polytechnique and I study just as much in violence as in medicine.”

“You are our undoctor, then,” shrugged Grantaire. “I don’t know anyone else to trust, if I’m honest.” He felt his smile go a bit too tense, bitter.

“And why do you trust me?”

“I needn’t judge for myself; I have allowed someone far more prejudiced towards judgement tackle that for me,” Grantaire replied, trying to lighten the mood.

Again, Combeferre struggled towards and then succeeded in parsing Grantaire’s terribly explained meaning.

“Because Eve-Marie trusts me?” he asked, looking faintly amused. Grantaire scowled.

“Like I said, he’s judgemental enough for all of society. And I am lazy. May as well let him do the work, deciding who is trustworthy and who is not.”

“And here I would never have said you trusted Eve-Marie in the least,” said Combeferre, smiling like Grantaire was an interesting puzzle. Grantaire could tell him not to bother; Grantaire was more a game of roulette, the kind that never came up the way you expected or hoped. Barack

Combeferre reached towards the peach basket and waited for Grantaire’s nod to lift Amantine. He remembered to support her head, and smiled at her, every inch at ease.

Grantaire didn’t say anything, and as Combeferre began to look over Amantine, he went back again to the subject of inoculations.

“I shall try to let you make at least one decision of your own; I fear Eve-Marie has little in the way of an opinion on inoculations.”

“I shall make a statement of mine in his presence,” replied Grantaire drily, peering at one of the thermometers. “And allow him to disagree, thus forming a stance on the subject.”

Combeferre frowned. “Eve-Marie isn’t like that,” he said slowly. Grantaire shrugged roughly, feeling wrong-footed.

“Tell me about inoculation.”

“Very well. Will you be so good as to support the torso as I inspect the legs? Thank you. Well. The concept of inoculation rather divided the enlightened world. Mathemeticians object on the grounds of probability theory, and the assumption that if there is a chance of a true infection, it will eventually occur, more often the larger the pool of subjects involved. However, there is no medical procedure without that exact risk, and there is no actual numerical statistic of how many healthy cases result in how many infections. Catherine the Great had herself and her son the heir inoculated in secret, and announced it upon its success. Perhaps she saved her line in that manner. In addition, one need not use the smallpox-tainted miasma or viscera anymore; success has been had with the less malicious cowpox, and that is likely what I would use on Amantine.”

“Do I have to decide now?” Grantaire asked after a long silence, when Amantine was back in his arms.

“Not at all; she is yet far too young. Perhaps in two years.”

“Two years!” exclaimed Grantaire. It seemed an impossibly long amount of time, but this spring the very concept of Amantine had seemed impossible altogether. Yet here he was.

“I should really also examine the mother as well,” Barack pressed again, gentle but firm. He put a hand on Grantaire’s arm and Grantaire stared at it, unsure of what to do with it. It felt good to be touched. He tried not to notice. “It is the done thing. A woman is at terrible risk during childbirth, and still at terrible risk afterwards.”

Grantaire did not know how to deflect this line of attack, but Combeferre took his muteness as leave to continue. “The woman can suffer from complications of excessive bleeding resulting in an imbalance of humors which can prove fatal even days after birth. One must make sure the afterbirth is correctly delivered and dealt with, and often herbal teas can be used, especially in my studies of Chinese medicines, but also in our own lands. Nettle tea is often used by housewives and herbwomen, and I believe it most effective from the accounts I’ve received.”

“I’m afraid we’re at a misunderstanding sir,” Grantaire said. He did not even know what was meant by afterbirth. “I know very few details of the birth--”

“Yes, of course, I only meant to ask about the woman who attended the mother--”

“She is unavailable.”

“And… the mother?”

“Unavailable.”

“Ah.”

Barack Combeferre sat down, eyes sharp under his dark mop of hair, and Grantaire shuffled to do the same. Grantaire thought maybe he ought to have said she was dead, but he was honestly a little shaken by Combeferre’s vehement listing of all the grisly ways Floréal could die. Such a disguise felt like tempting fate.

“It’s been perhaps two weeks since the birth. Should she be safe, now?” Grantaire asked weakly.

“Ahm. Relatively,” Barack said, thinking. “If you say it is impossible then I must believe you. I confess I thought at the Montgolfier ball that you simply wished to not speak indelicately in public.”

“I have no trouble with indelicate speech,” Grantaire said wryly. Gesturing to the peach basket, he added, “Or indelicate actions.” He did not wish to have Combeferre see him as some sort of model citizen, only to be disappointed and rescind his services as undoctor. Better to get it out now. If Combeferre really were such a good friend of both Ève-Marie Enjolras and de Courfeyrac, it seemed impossible that some talk of wild Grantaire had not reached Combeferre, but you never knew. Perhaps the man was simply too polite. He had a strange courtesy about him that seemed as natural as breathing, but not quite the same as de Courfeyrac’s carefully learned manners.

“I do know - just a few things,” Grantaire said carefully. “Medical details, I think.”

“I would appreciate those,” Combeferre said kindly.

And so Grantaire related the contents of the short letter received from Floréal, and ended it with -- “But I’m concerned about the baby, because I understand she was born with the, euh, umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Could it have caused her harm?”

He was truly anxious about this, and annoyed when Combeferre laughed softly. “As far as I know, that is actually common, though to be avoided if possible. Actually, my mother was Kenyan, and if she were here, she would insist I tell you that in the lands we call in France so lovingly call the ‘regions unexplored’ of the African continent, there was once a little girl called Ana Nzinga. She too was born with the cord wrapped around her neck. In her country this was considered a sign that a person would grow up to be haughty and perhaps vain, but the midwife looked down at the baby and declared that she would be a queen -- and of course, she was. She’s quite admired for how she fought off the Portuguese. And ever since, to my mother’s people it’s been seen as quite the sign of good luck!” He smiled, a little sardonic. “I will take another look anyhow, if you like.”

Amantine was handed back over.

“After your story, I really worry she will grow up to be an Ultra and a royalist, if not a queen! Enjolras would be so disappointed,” Grantaire joked to try to calm his own nerves.

“Oh, Ève-Marie?” Combeferre murmured. “He seems quite curious about her. You should invite him by, so he’ll stop fretting at the rest of us all the time.”

Grantaire grinned. “Please let him know that I am the pinnacle of fatherhood, and my daughter shall rule the unknown lands of Africa, where she will await his revolution.”

Eyebrows were raised over calm, dark eyes that maybe held the slightest hint of warning. His voice contained no sharpness, however, when he said, “Perhaps with an adjustment of tone... I will pass along news of the infant’s good health at very least.”

“All I can ask, I suppose,” mumbled Grantaire.

“And she is certainly to be called Amantine? I was not sure, the other evening,  if you were determined, or merely playing along to divert the subject.”

Blunt. Had he really seemed so agitated? It was quite possible. He had...shouted at little Jean Prouvaire. Oh my.

“No,” said Grantaire, now a little uncomfortable. “I did like Amantine. She will be, euh, Amantine Antoine Grantaire -- the middle name after my Master at the studio, his first name.”

Barack smiled. “I have heard of Antoine-Jean Gros.”

It was always strange to Grantaire that Maitre Gros was famous, even though that was basically his job: to paint famous pictures.

“So, you have already done her birth certificate, then?” asked Barack, wandering into a hall off his parlor. Grantaire shifted Amantine around - he must, he thought, become used to the sound of her name in his head, as well as on his lips - and trailed after the sound of Combeferre’s voice.

“Euh.”

“Or not?” called Barack from somewhere nearby.

“I...perhaps I have been a bit late with it.” He had forgotten entirely.

“Well, I shall be happy to assist. I only came France of an age to attend a Parisian lycee; I know much of the bureaucratic matters necessary to become a citizen of the state.”

Grantaire pushed open a door he thought Combeferre might be behind, but found instead a bookroom piled high with papers and beautifully bound books. On the walls were early hand-painted lithographs of ornithological scenes, and even older stipple etchings of flowers and plants of the New World. From what Grantaire knew of the art market, this was quite the rare and expensive collection. He went to examine the print nearest him, an exquisitely detailed egret on a tuft of turf, and nearly knocked a stack of broadsheets.

In his haste to catch them one-handed, he managed to really knock them across the side table where they had been precariously perched. They fanned out for him, blaring their titles: _La Quotidienne_ and _La Gazette, Drapeau Blanc_ and _Oriflamme_ . These had been at the bottom of the stack; the rest lay haphazardly out; he saw _Le Courrier français_ and _Le Censeur_ on the floor; a few copies of _Le Courrier français_ had tipped between the bookshelf and the table.

A pattern emerged, even as Grantaire tried to ignore it. Each appeared to be grouped by their political affiliation -- easy to do, for all newspapers in France came with a political party. So far he had found the Constitutionnels’ three favorites. Across the desk were some old copies of _La Minerve_ , _Le Constitutionnel_ and _Le Globe_ : here were the Independants. The lowest on the stack were the Ultra-Royalists’. It was ridiculous how many there were; Grantaire, like most Parisians, could not afford a newspaper subscription, and even if he could, had grown up in the strict censorship of Napoleon and did not often remember that it was an option. Also, it was politics, and only politics, that really made the papers. It was also politics that often shut them down.

He remembered that Barack Combeferre had been speaking to men who owned a printing press at the Montgolfier ball. Before he could think further on that, he noticed something else: in various degrees, the newspapers were marked up by an anonymous penman, or several. The publications of the Ultras were the most edited. He leaned in and squinted; Amantine flopped back alarmingly and he caught her head just in time. The margin notes were rebuttals and clarifications; Grantaire caught several citations of philosophers. Not old ones; recent ones. _Revolutionary_ ones. Occasionally, sometimes often, a phrase would be circled, and in neat little letters next to it was simply to the word “LIE”.

He wondered what it meant. He felt better to wonder what it could _not_ mean.

Combeferre called his name.

“Sorry!” he said, “I was, euh, Amantine.”

He found the right door this time

“Well,” Barack Combeferre was saying, “there’s no time like the present. Also, the bureaucrats will be getting back from their luncheon right about now.”

“It’s almost four o’clock?” Grantaire said.

“Exactly. One mustn't hurry lunch in France,” Barack said in a deeply knowing voice. “Also, this will take three hours unless we go near the end of the day, and everyone wants to go home. If you would take the mademoiselle?”

Grantaire took Amantine and said, “But...do we need the witness of the mother?”

“No,” Barack replied, grimly straightening the knot of his cravat. “The mother is, somehow, not required for the paperwork. But we shall not go in unarmed.”

***

Sophie-Philip’s mother sent a letter, dictated to the village priest and painstakingly signed, allowing her daughter’s marriage to one Luc Poulin. It was required for the Civil Ceremony, if Sophie-Philip was younger than twenty-eight.

She wore her pink dress, trimmed with lace she had tatted herself in her mother’s cottage, worrying constantly that the whitework would be spoiled by the soot from the old chimney. There was a shawl as well, for her coat was too ragged for even the blandness of a civil ceremony. This match was better than she should have expected, but by no means was this a society marriage. As this was France, it was not even required that they take part in the expense of the secondary religious ceremony in a nearby church. No one would be throwing rice or baby shoes, and she and Poulin would not ride off in a barouche box, tossing coins and sweets to the parish poor and children, carrying garlands and cheering. They would find their town hall, and mount the steps in the November wind with a small line of other couples and witnesses. Once inside, they would meet with a clerk and a notary, swear that they were not bigamists etc, and sign their names on the marriage register.

She could lace her corset again, though loosely, and was glad of it. They waited on the steps with three other couples, Sophie-Philip trying to ignore the faces in the market that sprouted up around the edges of the square on Wednesdays. She had known the girls of Paris well; she knew the faces, knew the old women and the _gamin_ boys of this particular corner, which little boys were helpful for carrying a message and which had wandering hands.

Mostly, she was just glad to be indoors when their turn came. The clerk had quite the fire in the grate, and she wished they could stand in front of it, but stood straight and proper in front of the desk. She fixed a few fabric flowers decorating her bonnet; they probably did not need it.

She did not know their witnesses; they were Poulin’s.

Just over a week ago she had signed Floréal for the last time. Today, she signed away the woman called Sophie-Philip Gaugin. Who was that? A woman, one whom she largely recalled as a girl.

The old wives’ tales about magic and the old fairy tales came back to her. Witches would have so many names, because names were power and if someone knew a witch’s name, someone could control that witch. Name-magic. Power.

She signed the register, and wondered when she would begin to feel it.

It was over quickly; the witnesses joked with Poulin and shook his hand back on the steep steps. Sophie-Philip, only expected to blush and smile occasionally, took a moment for her own, to stare up at the clear, cold sky. It was a rough and chalky blue. She imagined winds blowing up there, winds blowing the future ever onwards, like the march of an immortal army.

“Madame Poulin,” someone said, and Luc was taking her hand and tucking it into the crook of his elbow. “Come away, darling.”

“That is I,” said Madame Poulin. She blushed. She smiled.

***

They took the four o’clock omnibus back to Grantaire’s neighborhood, Combeferre calmly insisting on paying Grantaire’s twenty-five centime fare. They filed into the lower level and pushed onto a bench, their backs to the window and Amantine on Grantaire’s lap. Once they’d piled out again, Barack stopped Grantaire with a hand on his forearm.

“You return home and collect any documents you might nor might not have. Even if they’re from the old regime. Feed the mademoiselle, and meet me outside the Cafe Giovanna, please.”

Grantaire did as requested and ignored the growing ache in his arm as he lugged Amantine along in her peach basket for the few minutes it took to reach the cafe.

Outside on the dusty cobbles, next to a horse that was relieving itself, Barack Combeferre awaited him, as well as - “Enjolras?”

The man turned to his name with a frown, and Grantaire realized that he’d stopped dead in middle of the street, and stepped closer just in time to avoid an angry orange-girl and her wagon and mule.

“Good-day,” Ève-Marie Enjolras said, still frowning. Grantaire suddenly remembered how he had last seen Enjolras, found crying in his rooms; he remembered viscerally the shape of Enjolras’s shoulders in his doorway, the cobweb strings of yellow hair that had curled up when Enjolras took off his hat indoors. And he remembered how they had fought over that act of charity, how even today Enjolras could’ve been penning a lying letter to his parents, breaking his word as a gentleman, and Amantine could’ve been--gone. Like a dream, an impossible baby.

He clutched her close. “Good-day,” he muttered. He thought he felt Combeferre’s gaze flash between them. Enjolras must’ve told him everything; Grantaire felt embarrassment flash through him, his cheeks filling with a dull flush.

“Shall we be off, Grantaire?” suggested Barack firmly, and shuffled Grantaire and - for some reason - Enjolras along with him.

“I hope you don’t mind, Grantaire” Enjolras finally muttered, after a few minutes of trailing Combeferre in silence, his shoulders inching towards his ears.

“I’m sure you’re welcome,” Grantaire replied, because it was in the polite script, and he was trying very hard. “I mean, I can understand if Combeferre needs an ally in dealing with my dirty laundry,” he added, trying for a grin.

“You shouldn’t talk about her like that, Grantaire,” was all the answer he received for his trouble. “Even very young children can understand more about tone than you think. And I’m not here for Bari.”

“Bari?” Grantaire asked. He tried to roll the R like Eve-Marie did.

“Barack,” said Enjolras, frowning like Grantaire was being purposefully difficult. “He asked me to be your second witness for the birth certificate.”

He said all of this with his eyes locked firmly on the horizon. Before Grantaire could respond, Barack called out, “Here,” and led them up to a building with a wide flight of stone steps.

Once inside, Enjolras and Grantaire let Barack do all the talking, by a mutual decision. This swiftly proved an intelligent move. Within thirty minutes they were sat down with an official notary, and Grantaire was being handed the piece of paper that would make Amantine his in more than blood - in ink, in law. He hadn’t realized just how paralized he’d been that someone would try to come take her away; someone worse than Enjolras, some nameless, faceless entity of law and he would be powerless to stop it. Now, he carefully penned her name above his on the paper. He shaped the letters as tenderly as he would sketch her face.

He was angry when told that she would still be considered illegitimate, but as no one would be fighting her over his will, and Barack was urging him onwards, he grit his teeth and accepted it.

To Grantaire’s surprise, while Barack was taking his time penning a suspiciously long signature, Enjolras leaned over and whispered, “There’s a way to legitimize her, later. You’ll need to save up the fee money, but it’s a matter of more paperwork, not so different from this. You can fix it.”

Grantaire met his eyes, wondering as he did so what expression he would find in them. Was the advice given in pity, or distaste? He wasn’t sure what he saw. Finally, he just said, “Thank you,” in an undertone. Enjolras merely nodded, and then took his turn signing his name.

“Please read it over, Monsieur Grantaire,” said the bored notary.

***

ACTE DE NAISSANCE

\----

MAIRIE de _Paris_

ARRONDISSEMENT communal d _u Faubourg St Germain_

Du _premier_ jour du mois de _novembre_ l’an _1826_ de la Royaume _de Charles X_

Acte de naissance de _Amantine Antoine Grantaire_ , née _à cinq_ heures d _u matin_ de _Rachel Grantaire de Rue d'Éléphant, fils de Hercule Grantaire de Brousse_

_/ / /_

La sexe de l’enfant a été reconnu être _féminine_

Premier témoin: _Muley Barack Combeferre, Thirteenth son of the Shareef of Wazan_

Second témoin: _Ève-Marie Enjolras_

***

“Oh,” said Grantaire distantly, tracing Amantine’s name. He glanced further down. “I thought your first name was Barack, Monsieur Combeferre. Have we all been mis-categorizing you all this time?”

“Ah,” said Barack. There was an odd sound from Enjolras on his left. “Well, it is. Barack, that is. That is, euh, ‘Muley’ is a title.”

Enjolras laughed, something Grantaire had rarely seen. “Barack has a complex family situation.”

“More complex than mine?” demanded Grantaire, “How could you, Barack.”

“Oh yes, let us tell _all_ our secrets, Ève-Marie,” grumbled Barack, when Enjolras opened his mouth again.

“I forfeit my turn, sirs,” said Grantaire quickly. “I feel I would come out the worst in that game.”

He hadn’t been trying to be funny, but they both laughed.

The notary shooed them out, ready for his supper. Outside, the wind was cold; cold enough that they did not pause on the steps to take in the last of the sunlight, or to look out over the crowd. Ève-Marie and Grantaire instead took turns peering into the peach basket, Grantaire pressing a finger against her cheek to check she was still warm enough. If there was a new wife in a pink dress somewhere in the crowded square, they did not see her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Combeferre is in the middle of recreating the Herschel Infrared Experiment bc it's fun and he's a nerd. Herschel placed a prism so that the rainbow fell on a table, and put a thermometer in each band of color, then placed another thermometer beyond the rainbow as his control - only the control was actually in infrared light invisible to us, so he discovered infrared, it was neat & important.
> 
> \- fuck yeah vaccination! Also shoutout to Catherine the Great of Russia, for supporting vaccines & science in 1762. In her own words, "My objective was, through my example, to save from death the multitude of my subjects who, not knowing the value of this technique, and frightened of it, were left in danger." 
> 
> \- "Bari" is my other Fav Nickname


	6. In which a wet nurse is hired

Grantaire’s appearance at the studio of Baron Antoine-Jean Gros did not go as smoothly as the outing to the undoctor’s. He arrived clean-shaven and wrapped up in his fanciest greatcoat, combined with the yellow silk waistcoat that Floréal had embroidered for a horrifying price. Amantine was wrapped up and dressed in what Grantaire suspected had originally been a christening gown, but had been donated by a neighbor and was working for her as a morning dress.

She was in the peach basket again, which was the only threat to the respectability of such a well-groomed pair. Grantaire found he liked the arrangement anyway. He could carry her; he could set her down. He did not have to worry about any horror stories - courtesy of one Louis Joly, who had read a pamphlet - about the newfangled American baby carriages that were easier to fall out of than to stay in.

“Where in _seven hells_ have you been, Rachèl Grantaire?” growled Antoine-Jean Gros, appearing in the doorway before Grantaire even made it to the gate. Doubtless Gros had been summoned by the cacophony of whispering gossips with whom Grantaire shared Master Gros and access to studio space. His peers crowded both street-facing windows.

Gros was a man in his mid-fifties who spent most of his time angry. Grantaire had seen a portrait from the early years of the Revolution, where Gros was depicted as a slim youth of twenty with a jaunty top hat, long-ish chestnut hair, and a sparkle in his eye. It was horrifying, like seeing your father in the bath.

“Two weeks, you disrespectful cretin!” roared Gros, from behind very bushy sideburns. “I don’t care if I’ve suffered a fit of madness and given you a greater share of responsibilities in this studio, if you disappear for two weeks, you had better be shitting your trousers off with the cholera. My God!” Gros thundered, helpfully, to the entire south bank. Grantaire fancied he heard a window rattle. The other members of the studio, their numbers reinforced by Gros’s students from the Academy, became more bold in their efforts find some necessary task near the front door with which to rubberneck. Passersby in the street were not attempting to be nearly so discreet.

“Ah, I can explain?” Grantaire tried, knowing that he could not, in fact, explain. He smoothed a hand over his wild black curls, willing them and the universe into submission. He hoped at least to get inside and limit their audience somewhat.

Somehow, in the midst of this wincing awkwardness and Gros’s insults of his father’s entire lineage, Gros’s shouting was reassuring.

Grantaire had been absolutely panicked when he began courting more work with Gros’s studio, desperately trying to wring from his life some semblance of money and respectability. He hadn’t actually considered whether or not he would like the work that he’d been so ready to set down last spring. Painting was the only trade Grantaire knew, and that stayed true even if he’d only started studying it to annoy his father. But the sight of the studio, with its gigantic windows looking out on the street and the strong scent of oil and colors felt like a relief, even if he was experiencing all of it while Gros cursed him and his ancestors, living and dead.

Gros himself had been great under Napoleon; he’d travelled with the emperor to paint his conquests, and  - Grantaire had privately thought, after he saw that youthful portrait - had perhaps been a willing conquest himself. He’d also had the job of choosing which paintings to advize Bonaparte to loot from whichever country they were sacking at the time.

Now, he was reduced to screaming at Rachèl Grantaire, his most-yelled-at student and only full-time apprentice. Gros faltered a moment, maybe because he began to register Grantaire’s odd calm, and the crooked smile that was sneaking into one corner of his face.

Grantaire did not know this, but since Gros had reared him almost from his entrance to the Academy and through the latest very difficult years, Gros had a very good read of Grantaire’s face. Gros knew what that smile meant. The British viceroy of India had once told Gros at a dinner party that animals would run away in the night before an earthquake, but it was quite a mystery how they knew it was coming. Gros had no experience with earthquakes, but quite a lot of experience with Rachèl Grantaire, and figured he knew just how those panicked elephants felt.

“Come in, Rachèl,” he bit out. “Absolutely at this moment!”

But he wasn’t quite fast enough, and every head on the street turned as Amantine began to wail.

The crooked smile widened as Grantaire proceeded up the path to the door.

“Good morning, _maitre_ ,” he said brightly over the squalling. Gros was very glad that God had seen fit to punish him while he was alive, in order to spare him an eternity stuck in Hell with Rachèl Grantaire.

The studio was not terribly productive that day.

 

Both Louis Lesgles and Louis Joly had claimed to be seeing La Musichetta, that Italian soprano styled with the name of a Parisian grisette, but who in fact was product of a conservatory in Naples. She was playing Rosina in this season’s _Barber of Seville_ , she had sung in Moscow and in New Orleans, and she was stunning.

She also lived outside the theatre district’s vibrant rows of houses bursting with desperate playwrites and set designers, and chose instead for herself the Italian sector, a warren of complex family lineages and dramas not terribly far from Grantaire’s own apartments, and appeared to be related to roughly half the inhabitants.

Grantaire found this out as a result of a note and an address his portress handed him when he returned home from the studio, exhausted and having not gotten much done but let Gros shout as much as he liked and also hold Amantine, which he did rather well for a man who had never had children.

The note read,

_R!_

_The portress says you and the mademoiselle are not in this afternoon, but when you are free to-night, we have discovered that our Very Good Friend’s landlady has many child-related items of which she no longer has a need. When she heard of your plight she, a goodly sort of landlady, apple of our eye, quite insisted that you come and collect such items as an old crib which neither she nor her daughters finds a need for._

_The address of our Very Good Friend is on the reverse._

_L &L _

And when he went, the Very Good Friend welcomed him in, dressed in severe black, her face serious yet unmistakable - it was on posters, and also doodled very poorly in the margins of the notes Louis Joly had given Grantaire with which to forge his Classics papers.

Grantaire found himself in a sitting room populated with the two Louis, a famous soprano, and a giant piano forte. In the center of it all was a large wooden cradle and various small packages, presumably mysterious infant-related items.

“Please, do as you wish. It is yours. I only ask that you do not require too much conversation from me; I am working.”

She did not say this unkindly. Grantaire hallowed his friends and wandered to the cradle, experimentally settling Amantine down inside. Joly and Lesgles crowded around, to see how this new contraption was received.

“Bad omen, to bring a baby into the world in winter,” said Joly eventually, inspecting a little toy horse and watching Grantaire rock the cradle to the heavy, steady beat of Musichetta’s metronome. Grantaire was about to snap at him when he laughed, warm over the wind on the shutters and the creak of the cradle, and leant over Amantine. “You’ll squirm right away from bad omens, won’t you, _chou_?”

Amantine gurgled sleepily at him, and kicked out a little frog-leg half-heartedly. Grantaire heard a noise, or maybe felt a gaze – whatever it was, he wasn’t even very surprised to turn and see Ève-Marie Enjolras in the doorway, still wrapped up from the outdoors. Snow was melting on his hat-brim.

Enjolras’s eyes widened a little when he saw everyone turn to him, except Musichetta, who didn’t look up from her music. He held up the large bundle in his hands, which looked to be about half of a cloth-seller’s stall from the markets at Les Halles.

Then his gaze fell on Grantaire.

“Barack did not say you would be here,” Enjolras said, frowning. “I thought it was Joly and Lesgles who needed help carrying things to your building.”

“And why would I not come in person to collect on a kindness done to me?” Grantaire demanded, feeling brittle.

“What is that you have there, Eve-Marie?” interrupted Joly, nervously.

“I heard you were collecting things for Amantine here,” he said. “Bari suggested you might welcome some cloth - for pillows and clothing and bedding. I understand there are a lot of things infants need.”

“I see, that is very good of you!” Joly said, a little too loudly and definitely with too much forced cheer, attempting to cover the tension between Grantaire and Enjolras. Musichetta it seemed had actually been listening, because she snorted and raised an eyebrow. Joly spread his arms, beseeching, and she laughed at him. She’d been singing so carefully that her laugh was pitched high and rang out in a perfect series of notes.

“It’s mostly sprigged calico,” Enjolras said tightly. Grantaire thought he could see undyed silk as well, which Enjolras all but confirmed by frowning and asking, “Do you think it will be soft enough? I bought some others for a secondary strategy.”

“I believe so,” said Grantaire. “But will we be able to find her again once you’ve wrapped her up?”

Enjolras frowned at him. “It doesn’t do to laugh,” he said, a bite creeping back into his voice. “And there’s no reason it should go to waste. I’m sure we can hire a girl to make them into clothes when she’s older.” He stared at Grantaire as if to dare him to challenge Enjolras’s attempts at bourgeoise practicality. Grantaire, for his part, was mostly trying to understand why he was so annoyed. That Enjolras was so oddly over eager to help with Amantine, yet had been so taken aback by Grantaire’s actual presence?

Grantaire instead carefully studied the calico covered in the tiny flower print, the milk-colored silk. No doubt Enjolras had chosen at complete random, and who knew what prices he’d been coaxed into paying. A young gentleman, his waistcoat red silk, buying up the fabric market! Grantaire and Amantine were sure to hear all about this from the baker in the morning.

“You caused a scandal at the market, didn’t you?” said Joly, laughingly echoing Grantaire’s train of thought. He leant over Amantine again. “Do you see what Monsieur Enjolras has done for you? Look how well-swaddled you shall be.”

A little saliva drooled out of the side of Amantine’s mouth as she stared dolefully up at Joly. This seemed to be her response.

Louis Lesgles silently went to help Enjolras, who didn’t even have the decency to blush, to unwrap the yards of calico and nestle Amantine into a bundle knotted to a sling.

“You’ll have to wear it over your coat,” Joly told Enjolras while Grantaire hefted the cradle.

“Thank you again for this, Musichetta,” Grantaire said politely, gesturing to the cradle. Musichetta nodded distantly, her eyes only flicking up briefly from her pages of hand-written music. “You’re not coming with us?” he asked the Louis’ in some desperation, but they both flicked a gaze at Musichetta, and Louis Lesgles said, “not tonight, R.”

Fine, fine, Grantaire was a man, he could deal with this like a man.

It only made sense that Enjolras carry Amantine in her strange cloth sling while Grantaire, who was built significantly stockier and who up until a year ago spent his evenings boxing or practicing canne de combat instead of penning angry pamphlets, carried the heavily cradle and few other bits and bobs donated by Musichetta and the Italian street. He hoped Floréal wouldn’t castrate him for allowing a man she didn’t know well to carry the baby.

It was either snowing lightly or sort of sprinkling sleet on the streets; Grantaire wasn’t entirely certain, just knew that it was slippery and that it was cold and he could see little wet flurries like flies around the torches that lit the wider avenue beyond Musichetta’s smaller street. They angled towards the Latin Quarter, Grantaire swearing profusely as his boots slipped on the cobblestones and mud and horse shit, the last of which Enjolras seemed to have such a talent for avoiding that Grantaire was tempting to allow him to proceed as their vanguard.

When they’d stumbled their way to his building and up the stairs (Grantaire’s portress had long given up on him at this point), Grantaire set down the crib and looked around for Enjolras, who seemed to be loitering in the big room.

“You can put her down, you know,” Grantaire said shortly, “She has to be getting heavy by now.”

Enjolras looked up from fiddling with the fabric and stared Grantaire down like he had levelled some insult Enjolras’s way, and it was time for pistols at dawn. Then Enjolras opened his mouth and said, “I can’t undo the knots.”

Grantaire laughed at him and his face became even more sour, but Grantaire ignored his scorn - ease of practice - and went to inspect the wrappings.

“Ah,” he whispered, because Amantine was asleep for sure, face squished up against her sling in a way that honestly wasn’t too attractive, but she was the best ugly baby in the world, so what did it matter? “I think you’d better sit down - in here, the bed’s wide enough - and it’ll take the strain off the knots. I don’t want to jolt her.”

Enjolras nodded mutely.

Grantaire preceded him into the bedroom, opening the shutters in an attempt to air out the scent of stale milk and sweat. He worried for a moment that Enjolras would take in the state of the place and fly into another lecture about Grantaire’s unsuitability as a parent, but nothing seemed forthcoming aside from a little mutinous embarrassment. He sat gingerly on the unmade bed and waited for Grantaire to come up to them. Grantaire discovered how much he would have to lean into Enjolras’s normally guarded space.

Enjolras smelled like winter, like a snowfall, like crisp air, and a door opening into a warm cafe, and the light spice of port and wine.

The Grantaire of a year ago would probably, would maybe, have done something here. Something Irma Boissy would call intolerable, and Floréal would call unspeakably stupid.

He thinned his lips. He was a little tired of being this ‘good’ Rachèl Grantaire. He resented only being liked when he was happier, steadier. Being sought out suddenly when he had a funny new personality quirk called Amantine. But of course, back when his funny personality bit was a newfound desire to hit the bottom of every bottle he’d ever seen, that had roused much less popularity.

Grantaire swallowed it down, and he felt Enjolras’s eyes tracking him. He expected Enjolras to ask about the pause, he did not. He just waited through it, until Grantaire started on the first knot, and then Enjolras’s gloved hands came up to cradle Amantine in her blankets, so she wouldn’t be jostled.

Grantaire felt his heart ache anyhow.  Stupid, that he wished Enjolras was shouting again. He couldn’t think too hard, not about any of this. He couldn’t drink the gin stashed under his bed, he couldn’t spend a long night in an opium den. Couldn’t lean closer and just rest like Amantine against a warm chest.

He could taste the ghost of these things on his tongue, the heft of a hookah between his lips; he glanced up at Enjolras, away again quickly. It built in his throat, danced in the aching space between his lips, a roaring and trapped desire, so strong it was almost pleasure in itself. He ripped at the knots, desperate to finish them and free himself and Amantine both. When he was not looking, Enjolras’s forehead creased into a frown.

“Is there some trouble?” Ève-Marie asked. He shifted and the hair he wore down and loose brushed Grantaire’s forehead.

“No,” muttered Grantaire. His hands, again, shook and let him down. He did not know if it was exhaustion or emotion. He was tired of both.

“She likes singing,” Ève-Marie said suddenly. Grantaire was momentarily jolted out of his own head.

“Euh, I suppose? It’s the done thing with children,” Grantaire said, unsure, distracted. A knot slipped free, and he scrambled to the next one.

“No, I mean earlier, she looked intent. She liked Senora Giulia’s music.”

“Senora Giulia…? Oh, La Musichetta, is that her name? I did not realize you knew it.”

“Joly and Lesgles talk of her all the time,” Enjolras said, dismissive. “Do you know any lullabies?”

“In my family, we were just to say our prayers at bedtime.” There, the last knot freed. Grantaire stumbled, back away. He ended up clutching a set of drawers to steady himself. His blood was fizzing.

“Hmm,” said Enjolras. He whistled three notes, high and clear. They were sudden and sharp in this little space, but Amantine blinked, and one of her feet kicked out. Enjolras whistled again, a full line this time, those same notes sparkling and rapid, over and over. Grantaire raised an eyebrow.

“That song? Please don’t sing her the modern version you sans-culottes have come up with,” he said, choking down a smile.

To his shock, Enjolras chuckled a little. “Oh, you don’t want ‘And when we’ll have hung them all, we’ll stick a shovel up their arse’? Fear not, I know the original _Ca Ira_ as well.”

Amantine’s dark eyes watched them, waiting, it seemed. Enjolras wouldn’t look at Grantaire, even in the low light. That was probably good; Grantaire felt flayed open. Enjolras kneeled down and regarded Amantine with seriousness to match hers.

His voice was nothing like the professional soprano they’d heard earlier in the evening, with its ethereal polish, its stamina. He had the voice of a choir-boy, and perhaps he found that embarrassing, but he didn’t look it. He picked up volume and confidence a few lines in, kneeling in front of the bed and quietly but steadily singing,

“Our enemies, confounded, stay petrified -- And we shall sing Alleluia! Ah, _ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!”_

 

Grantaire laughed, and perhaps it emboldened Ève-Marie, who squared his shoulders and tossed his head, blond curls tumbling. He knelt self-consciously by the bed and extended a hand to Amantine, and serenaded her.

   
---  
  
_Ah ! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira_

| 

_Ah ! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine_  
  
Le peuple en ce jour sans cesse répète,

| 

The people on this day repeat over and over,  
  
_Ah ! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira_

| 

_Ah ! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine_  
  
Malgré les mutins tout réussira.

| 

In spite of the mutineers everything shall succeed.  
  
Nos ennemis confus en restent là

| 

Our enemies, confounded, stay petrified  
  
Et nous allons chanter « Alléluia ! »

| 

And we shall sing Alleluia  
  
_Ah ! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira_

| 

_Ah ! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine_  
  
Quand Boileau jadis du clergé parla

| 

When Boileau used to speak about the clergy  
  
Comme un prophète il a prédit cela.

| 

Like a prophet he predicted this.  
  
En chantant ma chansonnette

| 

By singing my little song  
  
Avec plaisir on dira :

| 

With pleasure, people shall say,  
  
_Ah ! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira_

| 

_Ah ! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine_  
  
 

It built and built, in the way music demanded sometimes. Grantaire joined in on the final line, badly, but wanting some share in this, belting out, “Ah, It’ll be fine, It’ll be fine, It’ll be fine!” into the dark, as if there was no fear, as if they were reassuring the city herself along with this little bedroom. With Grantaire stamping his foot in time like country clog-dancers, Enjolras with his head shyly ducked, slapping the floor to join in, like fools, they came to a flourishing end.

“Don’t worry, R,” Enjolras said, grinning at Amantine, breathless, so much earlier tension forgotten with shocking ease, “I’ll teach her the Marseilles, too.”

“Thank you,” Grantaire said drily, trying not to sound quite as shaken and out of breath as he was. “That little ditty includes the verb for ‘to slit a throat’, which I’m sure will be helpful vocabulary for her.”

Enjolras, still kneeling on the floor, tipped his face up and smiled.

Enjolras left soon after that, and now Grantaire realized with horror, he knew what Enjolras looked like when he was singing for the joy of it. It was such a contrast; the man the girls called the aloof Apollo, who never deigned follow his friends from cafe to dance hall: Yet he would act this way in front of Rachèl Grantaire, a man he did not even particularly like most of the time.

Knowing what he looked like singing for Amantine was just a cruelty, Grantaire thought, hand on his mouth like he could hold the surging inside him in.

 

It was no trouble to appear the virgin for Luc. He was not inclined to worry, and the act itself, near enough to childbirth, was unfortunately unpleasant enough that no acting was really required of Sophie-Philip. He was quite quick. She had taken his likely virginity into account: his lack of what one might call ‘moral diseases’ and others might call syphilis was reassuring, and she knew she could train him up. The idea even rather appealed to her, once she’d had a full night’s sleep and some Turkish coffee with her light breakfast.

Sophie-Philip caught the maid inspecting her bed linens for a stain of blood, like Sophie-Philip was a medieval princess and her “virginity” a matter of the state. Sophie-Philip had fortunately been too well informed to actually bleed the first time she’d bedded a man; the irony was that in this case the maid found her tawdry drop of blood - doubtless Sophie-Philip had pulled a stitch, from where the midwife had patched her up.

“Do be so kind as to refrain from hanging our bedsheets out the front window as proof to the neighbors,” she told the girl, making her jump and glare. “It would perhaps give the wrong impression.”

The maid scowled, and Sophie-Philip returned to her coffee with a smile.

 

Perhaps two days later, Grantaire and Amantine returned from Gros’s studio to their apartments on the third floor to find a goat standing in the middle of their home. In his building, on the third floor, he reiterated to himself, just to be sure and certain. The goat continued to exist.

He shut the door and left his packages in the hall, and hefted Amantine onto a shoulder. He opened the door again; the goat was still there. He shut the door. He went down the stairs. He looked into the muddy courtyard formed by four buildings with their backs facing each other, where the neighbors kept their goat.

The neighborly goat was also there.

“The world is an amazing place,” he informed Amantine.

He looked up the staircase. He shared a glance with Amantine - or he fancied he did, but she did appear to have some trouble focusing on his face, and could as easily have been staring into the distance.

He snatched the waiting bottle of goat’s milk - from the _correct_ goat, and the neighbors downstairs - from in front of his front door and decided that the Cafe Giovanna would be perfectly suitable for dinner.

When he arrived he found that the young Mademoiselle Giovanna did not believe him. “R,” she said, “I’ve heard so much from you that I’m still not sure Amantine isn’t some strange charade.”

“I’m honestly a little offended?” Grantaire tried. He was balancing Amantine in the crook of one elbow and using one of Mlle Giovanna's soup bowls for the milk-and-rag combination to feed Amantine. “But I’m serious about the invasive goat.”

“I’d as much believe you if you said it was a bear,” Mademoiselle Giovanna informed him, before Madame Giovanna yelled her back into the kitchen.

Monsieur de Courfeyrac walked through the door, hailed Madame Giovanna with a wave and several kisses, and politely demanded oysters and the house wine for himself and Jacqueline, who shadowed his steps.

For her own part, Jacqueline had no intention of dealing with bears. She was happy to come along with Ciprian, he was very sweet and quite a lot of fun, but while he fell in with the young men clustered at a table, she retreated closer to Grantaire, to a table containing Irma Boissy and two young ladies in absolutely gigantic bonnets who were thus unidentifiable. Irma was positioned to be able to glare at Grantaire across the two tables between them, but otherwise he and Amantine were left alone.

“How are you, Jaques?” Irma asked. Where Jacqueline was thin and pale, Irma was dark-skinned, boisterous, with snapping black eyes and a thick mane of hair which she teased into fashionable loops and waves. She delighted in hating Grantaire and pampering her friends, and if she could do both at once she was in raptures.

“As well as I can be,” sighed Jacqueline. “Look at this,” she said, lifting her shawl to show a thin gold chain upon which hung some sort of large metal locket. “At least it’s nothing truly dear, but it’s terrifically gaudy all the same. He likes to see me wear it, but I don’t think he has any idea how it looks, to have me going around in jewelry grander than I ought to.” She shuffled her shawl mostly back in place. “If my landlady sees it, she’s going to think I stole it, at least. I’ve given over care of the rose plant he left to my neighbor. He’s interested in plants and, well, most anything he can learn about in a book.”

“One time,” Irma said, leaning in, “some poor boy tried to give Sophie-Philip his mother’s emerald set. Imagine it! She told me about that; I wish she’d told me how she got herself out of it.”

“Well, she got herself that banker instead,” laughed Jacqueline. “Oh, there’s Jeannette!”

Jeannette wore her red hair partially loose about her shoulders and approached with more reserve than her friends. She too went to join the two grisettes and two bonnets, but spotted Grantaire and stopped by his table to enquire after the health of the baby.

“Amantine is well and I am tolerable,” replied Grantaire, surprised to be approached. He knew Jeannette through Jacques and Floréal, but they she hadn’t come drinking much, hadn’t spoken to him much either. She gazed at him with dark, level eyes - knowing, almost?

Grantaire started.

“You have never been tolerable,” called Irma, who had not tried to resist eavesdropping.

“Actually,” said Grantaire, catching Jeannette’s surprised eye as she turned to leave him. “Actually, do you know much about goats?”

Jeannette shrugged, but did not turn him off.

“I understand that they like to climb.”

“That is so,” she replied slowly.

“Do you believe they could climb stairs?”

“I… do not necessarily see it as beyond their ability.”

“And do they unlock doors and operate the handles?”

Jeannette narrowed her eyes. “I have other things to do tonight, you know, than be teased by you, Bacchus.”

“As did I,” said Grantaire, a little surprised that the nickname had spread so far. “But I am hiding here for I have been routed from my own home by a goat.”

He was not doing well in most things, but this at least made Irma Boissy spit out her wine.

“Who _is_ this?” he heard one of the bonnets whisper to Irma, patting her back with vigour that belied her ladylike dress.

“And who’s child is that? He’s not - not your particular friend, Jeannette?” whispered the other bonnet in scandalized tones.

Irma, eyes watering still, caught her breath and went to take another sip, then froze in the middle of reaching to stare at Grantaire. “You know,” she said, “I think Rachèl Grantaire is not joking?”

“Be still!” said the first of the bonnets suddenly, “Did you say he is called Grantaire?”

“Aurore!” called a man from the knot of students at the tables near the fire. “Aurore come here, Combeferre has a request for you.” And the first bonnet hesitated but went.

“What of this goat, Bacchus?” Irma sighed, mopping her face with a pretty handkerchief. Jacqueline helped herself to Irma’s wine, and Jeannette sat back with her arms crossed.

“A goat has gained access, whether by accident or design, to my home. It is in my parlor.” He paused. “It is likely eating my mending.”

“Did you contact your neighbors?” asked Jeannette, unimpressed. “Perhaps someone is very much missing their goat.”

“Perhaps….” said Jacques, trailing off with her eyes on the rowdy tables by the fire, where someone was yelling shrilly about Madame du Stael. Grantaire might have imagined the way her eyes flicked right to Ciprian de Courfeyrac. “Perhaps it was...a very misguided, very impractical gift? Just theorizing.” She did fiddle with her locket in a meaningful way, however.

Grantaire leaned back and graced the ceiling with a very long sigh.

Irma was laughing at him again. She even patted his knee. “Which of them do you think did it, R?”

“I did...I did have a conversation with Barack Combeferre about the efficacy of goat’s milk and melted butter as a substitute for a wet nurse,” Grantaire admitted, looking at Amantine and not their pitying faces.

“Could have been any of the three of them, then,” Irma sighed, thrusting an elbow in the direction of the head of the group, where Enjolras and Ciprian stood speaking seriously over a sheaf of papers, while a foot away Barack Combeferre was monologuing and thumbing through a Madame du Stael novel at alarming speed.

“Fantastic,” said Grantaire, resting his forehead tenderly on the tabletop.

“Well, this is more fun than an evening with no dancing,” Irma sighed, linking her arm with Jacques’s. “Take us to the scene of the villanery!”

“What?” Grantaire said.

“Come, I’ll tell Ciprian we’re away for home, and Bacchus is walking us like a gentleman,” Jacques announced, towing Irma, Jeannette, and Grantaire in her wake.

Of course, as soon as they approached the larger crowd in the firelight, the girls were swept up by five different people asking ten different questions, and Grantaire wound up standing off to the side, shuffling his feet and rearranging his grip on Amantine’s peach basket.

He was spotted by a sixth person: Ève-Marie Enjolras’s flinty gaze roze to meet his from across the hearth.

“What, Apollo?” Grantaire spat out, with more animosity than he’d meant to use. He wasn’t over here for any reason, and Enjolras had no reason to glare at him for crossing a room.

“I’ve just had a talk with Jean Prouvaire - you remember him? You should not… you should not have been so harsh with him last week at the Galleries du Bois, when he suggested ‘Melanie’ as a name. He feels that you were offended.”

“I was offended,” Grantaire said, because he didn’t feel like being guilted. He’d meant to leave it at that, but then he heard himself say, “My sister’s name is Melanie.”

And Enjolras stared for so long that Grantaire was sure he’d pursue that, that he was forming plans to do so that very moment. But Enjolras’s lips parted, and he said instead, with the same blurted air as Grantaire had just used, “You really are her father.”

“The hair does match,” Grantaire said, mouth a thin line in the firelight. “I take the mother on her word.”

 

“Well, it is certainly a milk-producing female,” said Jeannette, kneeling inside Grantaire’s front door with her head under a goat. Irma and Grantaire had taken up tactical positions against the far wall, while Jacqueline was calmly feeding the goat some meat pies.

“Do goats eat meat?” Grantaire asked nervously.

“Sush, Bacchus,” said Jacqueline serenely. “Try the pork,” she told the goat.

“She looks healthy, and very calm,” Jeannette said, inspecting the goat’s mouth like it was a purebred racehorse, in a break between pies. “Do you _want_  to keep her? For milk?”

Grantaire eyed his interviewee for wet nurse. She beadily eyeballed him back.

“Well, damn,” he said.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \-  check out the wiki page for Antoine-Jean Gros, because that main portrait is the one that so wholly traumatized grantaire. bb!gros was kind of a twink
> 
> \- "Ca Ira" can get pretty wild by 1826; fortunately Enjolras knows the tamer classics.
> 
> \- it is possibly very obvious by now but there will be a few horribly misused historical figures in this fic, and it is only going to get worse
> 
>  
> 
> @astronicht on twitter


	7. In which there are two Amantines

Jeannette, Jacqueline, and Irma Boissy came to call the Sunday a full week after Sophie-Philip was married. It must have been a long walk, and Sophie-Philip knew that everyone was working especially hard right now to pull in money before winter set in and field workers flooded the city for winter work. She wasn't sure how to express appreciation without seeming to lord her success over them.

The little group retreated to Sophie-Philip’s parlor, which was hers now, and done up in pale blue wallpaper that she liked. It was pretty, and calm.

“Well,” Sophie-Philip said as soon as her terrible maid had stopped lollygagging with the tea tray and had gone to listen at the keyhole instead, “You might as well tell me all the regular gossip.”

Jeannette rolled her eyes and passed over a package wrapped in the red headscarf Sophie-Philip had left in her room. “Here’s your wedding present, Madame Poulin.”

Irma raised an eyebrow and said to Jeannette, “My, way to make us look the rude ones.”

Jeannette shushed her, and Jacques said, “Well, Irma, why don’t you do the storytelling then, as your gift?”

Irma launched with gusto into a highly detailed dossier of everything Sophie-Philip might have missed while she was in the country for the summer, and a few she never wanted to know. It went a bit like this:

Barack Combeferre had gone back to Morocco to see his father, which was seen as a tragedy among the doctors trying to lure him to study at the Necker, and also one or two of Irma’s friends, who were madly in love with him even though everyone knew he was never going to finish at the polytechnique and go into a military life, and anyone who married him would likely have to hear about autopsies at the dinner table. It was a shame a doctor wasn’t much of a respected field.

The group of wild young poets who called themselves the bouzingos had thrown a party in their new house on Rue de Fer, and had adopted some boy still in school, but as beautiful as a dancing master, if short. Apparently he was a poet of some sort, and he and Irma and Jacqueline had spent a hilarious full night in an opium den, which Sophie-Philip found a little scandalous, but Irma laughed off.

Oh, and of course! The two Louises (here she of course meant Louis Joly and Louis Lesgles) were both claiming a close friendship with none other than the best opera singer of the season, a primadonna who called herself La Musichetta.

“Irma and I must go to the side door if your husband deigns to take you to the opera, which I daresay he will. He’s always struck me as a man who will enjoy showing you off, which is helpful. We will investigate La Musichetta and her hangers-on, and you can watch the stage and the audience,” Jacques said, bemused.

“Quite right,” said Irma. “I daresay we will be able to compare notes tolerably well. What a laugh! Anyhow-”

And so it was known also that the de Courfeyrac boy had nearly been arrested while walking down the street with Jacqueline - a pause, where Jacqueline waved a hand to show that Irma was welcome to tell her story - "Right," said Irma, "Walking down the street with Jacqueline, and de Courfeyrac refused to take his hat off to none other than Villele in the street! While he was hardly the King, he was certainly still the Prime Minister, and de Courfeyrac had snubbed him right where everyone could see. He’d only been saved from arrest because Villelle was so embarrassed about the scene being made."

“Ciprien does get away with everything,” Sophie-Philip murmerd in vague assent.

“Oh, and he was walking with Apollo as well, you know the one. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to get more than two words out of him all summer; Apollo still does not deign to come along to anything but a night at a cafe. No dance halls, certainly! And he wasn’t at the Rue de Fer party, we checked.”

“Come now, Irma,” Jacqueline teased, “you haven’t said anything of your favorite! We await in earnest your usual report on the many sins of one Rachèl Grantaire.”

Irma threw up her arms and sank back in her armchair, the picture of a woman at a loss. Jeannette looked bemused, but Sophie-Philip suddenly found herself anything but.

“Can I smoke my pipe in here, Madame Poulin?” Jeannette asked Sophie-Philip. Shaken and smiling as blandly as possible, Sophie-Philip managed to convey that Monsieur Poulin was out for the morning, and perhaps the maid might see through her station at the keyhole, but no one else was around to be scandalized by Jeannette’s manly habit (as she herself named it).

“Honestly, I do not know what to tell you, Floréal! I don’t know at all,” Irma said, invoking the old nickname. Sophie-Philip’s smile twitched; she worried that perhaps Jeannette caught it. Irma, fortunately, was distracted.

“First of all, Bacchus is not dead drunk quite so much as he was last spring. Remember his terrible joke about giving up sobriety for Lent?” She sighed, and there was some real feeling under her words, its roughness taking the place of her flippancy. “I like a good party as much as the rest of us, but I don’t - I can’t spend my time pulling up a man trying to throw himself away like that. I am quite free, for a woman. I refuse to, well - if I can’t help I do not want to be made to watch.”

Jeannette puffed gently on her pipe. The tobacco scent softened Sophie-Philip’s edges.

“I thought for sure that Monsieur Gros would rid himself of Grantaire by the time June was out, but instead it seems he’s given Grantaire a portion of commission work and all but promoted him!”

Grantaire had not mentioned any of this in his letters. Sophie-Philip did not know how to feel.

“But don’t worry, he’s not at all respectable!” Irma continued. “Here’s something more strange than ever from our Bacchus. You see, de Courfeyrac was supposed to meet Jacqueline at some cafe, but was an hour late before a note arrived saying some mad business had come up, and his friend was in dire need of aid - and as apology he left her a potted rose with a pretty little necklace in its branches, because he’s ridiculous.”

“And how is this about Rachèl?” Sophie-Philip asked, hands laced in her lap and trying not to appear to be avoiding the subject.

“Well, it’s about the friend in trouble, of course - Grantaire’s the most troublesome man in France, most days, and not in a fun way. Remember when he fell in Jeannette’s window box? Anyway, my friend knows a maid at the Montgolfier house, and she was telling me about two men who she described to sound most like de Courfeyrac and Grantaire, and well - she said one of the men had an infant in a basket and was touting it around! And I said, ‘La miss Gigi, don’t go telling tales! Perhaps it was a doll.’ But she said not, one of the men had a child in a basket. Half the guests thought there had been a kidnapping, but weren’t sure how to alert the Montgolfiers, because I mean, de Courfeyrac is recognizable. But of course, now we’ve seen it in person, at Madame Gio’s cafe, and Jacques here is telling us she knew almost from the arrival of the child!”

Jacques shrugged. "Ciprian came tearing into the Musain in quite a lather, and I was with Joly and Lesgles having a drink, and Joly asked him what the matter was. He quite confirmed the story."

“Goodness,” Sophie-Philip said, or heard herself say from a great distance. “Rachèl Grantaire has even overshadowed the news of my marriage.” Irma laughed.

“How is he? Your M'sieur Poulin, I mean,” Jeannette asked, tapping her spent tobacco on the grate.

Irma smiled and said, “I don’t care - I am calling him your Hades, as he’s stolen you away, and you have eaten his pomegranate,” she added with a wink.

“I feel Luc might take some offense,” Sophie-Philip said drily.

“Sorry, it works too well with you being Floréal - though I wish we’d named you as Persephone first; Grantaire quite messed up our Greek theme.”

“Feel free to re-Christen me,” Sophie-Philip Poulin said, “I’ve just done so, and I’ve found it not so hard.”

Irma laughed and Jeannette said, “But really, all is well? And the house, and the maid?”

“Ah,” Sophie-Philip said, reminded. “To answer, all is as it should be in marriage and marital bed. The maid though - I’m glad you reminded me. I know her, or know of her. I’ll manage the household from now on, thank goodness; I believe Poulin hired her with no instruction from a housekeeper. Her name is Thenardier, you see.”

“Lord,” Irma said. “And I suppose your cook is a bank robber, and your valet is Lacenaire!”

“Who?”

“Oh, Lacenaire, he’s a bad one. The police have sniffed around, but they don’t care what he did to the poor redskirt girl who-” her voice lowered, “works for Peporiov, on Rue des Chiens. However - _Thenardier,_ really!”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Sophie-Philip said. “So far, the Thenardier girl hasn’t been much trouble, but do keep an ear out, if you would. At very least, I’d like to know where the family is holed up, so I know where to march off to should I find myself robbed of every possession in the night.”

“Enquiries can be made,” said Jeannette, smiling icily. “But I hate to end on as vicious a note as this. It has been good to see you, Madame Poulin. Perhaps sneak us in more often.”

“I do not think it necessary to employ subterfuge, but if you feel the need for some feel free to sneak out through the kitchen door.”

Irma laughed and the three visitors did so, winking at a flustered delivery boy unloading parcels in the kitchen, and tumbling out onto the back street to walk home together. Sophie-Philip was a lone figure waving them off. She did not linger at the window, or sigh at the door. She and Luc were invited to a little dinner party tonight, and while she planned to stay quiet while she learned the lay of the land, it was necessary that she prepared herself thoroughly.

***

A knock sounded at Gros’s studio door Saturday morning, early enough that only Grantaire had arrived yet and most of the shutters on the grand windows were still closed against drafts, and a few lanterns were still lit. Grantaire had been up for a few hours already with Amantine but had not actually needed to speak with any fellow human beings for any of them. He felt particularly out of his depth when he opened the door just a crack and yet again appearing somewhere he did not belong, Eve-Marie Enjolras strode in with only a cursory knock, a lady strolling behind him in evening dress.

Enjolras did not say anything. The lady looked around with frank curiosity; she looked very familiar, but Grantaire could not place where he’d seen her.

“Ah,” said Grantaire. “Well, good morning?”

“Enchanted,” the stranger said. “Did you know someone has tied a goat to the front gate of your painter’s studio?” She was rather beautiful, with a low voice and very dark hair and a dress in deep red print on yellow. Very trendy, Grantaire understood, as pastels were now boorish. Floréal had told him as much.

“The, euh, the goat is meant to be there,” was all he could think to say. The goat was already proving to be useful in her ability to quietly eat Gros’s hedges and produce fresh milk throughout the day, at different locations. Gros had only yelled a little.

“I have been with Aurore Dupin at a dinner party,” Enjolras said, sounding almost proud. This appeared to be his way of introducing the lady - and she did appear a lady - that was, genteel, but with a touch of a Romantic about her. The curls that fashionably framed her face were loose and dangled in almost natural waves.

“So you… have, I see,” Grantaire said. It disconcerted him to realize that they were a matching set in their evening wear - Enjolras as severe as ever in mostly black, but with the same old-money stance. “Was it, euh, a nice party?”

“Yes,” said Enjolras, and nothing else.

“That you attended all night,” Grantaire observed, in a surprisingly mild voice, if higher in pitch than was perhaps normal.

“Quite!” said Aurore Dupin brightly, obviously versed in awkward men. “It was just a little thing but Gautier was there and he made it quite lively! Anyway, the likes of me could hardly show up to a Grand Cenacle meeting and debate the role of theatre with damned Victor Hugo, but a dear girl of my recent acquaintance wanted to attend. She is all confidence, so she will make an impression I am sure, but she is new to the circus, so I have decided to advise her.”

“You have a special interest in the dinner parties of opium-smoking poets?” Grantaire asked, because he had met Gautier and could not imagine that the party stayed small for long. She had said all of that quite calmly. He wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t misheard the profanity.

“My grandmother held artistic and intellectual salons when I was a girl, and I sat in.” Looking at her, Grantaire thought her little more than a girl still, maybe eighteen, though she wore it with the aplomb of a woman of six-and-twenty.

“Well,” said Grantaire, forcing down the urge to awkwardly clap his hands together and wake Amantine into crying. Unfortunately she was refusing to wake up on her own and save him from the ongoing surreal attentions of Ève-Marie Enjolras.

Grantaire was starting to feel for the saints. If the good Lord was as practiced at popping up unannounced as Enjolras was lately, Joan of Arc must have had a twitchy time of it.

“Seeing as you are here,” he said, filling silence, “Well, Madame Dupin, have you ever sat for a portrait before?”

“Oh, never for a professional!” Madame Dupin protested, grinning. “Or at least, none that have lasted longer than a year in the profession.”

Grantaire barked a laugh. “Some painter I am! Call me Master R - for the R of Rejection on the back of all my paintings sent to the Salon. It is my own signature.”

“Before you begin, may I introduce Amantine Grantaire?” interrupted Enjolras, gesturing to Amantine where her basket lay on the floor.

“Oh!” said the lady, taken aback. “Oh, this is _Amantine_. I did not expect to meet her!”

It was Grantaire’s turn to be startled. Enjolras broke in again.

“Yes. She’s - it’s hard to see her face under that awful bonnet, but she’s as lovely as I’ve said.”

“What,” said Grantaire.

“Amantine Grantaire,” said Aurore Dupin, bending down to whisper to the baby. “A pleasure to finally meet you. May I be so bold as to introduce myself? I am Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin.” She straightened only to drop a curtsy, grinning, then glanced up at Grantaire. Testing his reaction, he thought, feeling positively faint.

Amantine, Grantaire thought. Aurore. The two names Enjolras had put forward.

“Where would you like me to sit, Master R?”

“Let me open a shutter,” Grantaire mumbled, his fingers already fumbling with chalk. “How were the two of you, euh, acquainted?” He could kick himself; he really, really did not want to know that.

Aurore Dupin pulled a bench a little away from a wall and sat there in the half-gloom instead of the early morning sunlight spilling in from the shutters. Grantaire nodded his approval vaguely; direct light was the first thing he’d been taught to avoid in the Academy. She looked good in the shadows, like a Spanish beauty in one of Goya’s pictures, her yellow silk occasionally catching a sunbeam and sparking a thread or two.

“Since childhood,” replied Aurore when Enjolras was silent, bending over Amantine’s basket instead.

“Angle your shoulders a little to your left, please,” Grantaire mumbled miserably. Childhood friends? Good Lord. This woman rivaled Floréal in confidence; he could tell just by the way she twisted her shoulders.

“Aurore’s grandmother’s estate was near my family’s country home,” Enjolras said, volunteering more personal information than Grantaire had ever heard from him in years of vague acquaintance. And that was what they were - vague acquaintance, in a brief detente of hostilities.

How this encounter slotted in, Grantaire had no goddamn idea.

“Your head a little to your right, but your gaze slipping back towards me,” he instructed the beautiful woman. “It should feel like your torso is twisting. Can you hold it?”

“I think so,” she replied. “I’ve been more contorted sitting in some awful Tudor teak dining sets.”

A snort came from right behind Grantaire; he jumped. Enjolras had left Amantine to sleep, finally? Normally Enjolras wore no perfume, but now, standing behind Grantaire dressed for an evening out…. Grantaire could smell the perfumes he had walked through, the sweet cigar smoke, maybe even the bite of port on his breath. Each was like a slap to the face, the kind that made your ears ring. World-shifting, but only for the recipient.

He kept his eyes on the beautiful woman, the liquid way her wide eyes held light. Licked his lips, put chalk to paper.

“I’m beginning - you can move your lips, I’ll do the detail of your face last.”

“I’ve never sat like this before,” Aurore observed, holding very still.

“How familiar are you with Da Vinci?” Grantaire asked.

“Surely very, he painted La Joconde for the King of France, but gave it to his darling boy.” Behind him, Enjolras made a little noise. Grantaire could not place it, but Aurore laughed, sudden and loud. “Ève-Marie does not know him! And his education was - technically - better than mine. But then, Leonardo da Vinci is not so well known right now, but he has been loved and I feel he is on the rise again.”

Grantaire shrugged. His opinions on the rise and fall of artists and styles were rather complex and lengthy and he had yet to meet someone who was not a painter who cared to hear them in their entirety.

“One thing I like about Da Vinci,” he said to Aurore in his quiet, automatic talking-to-a-client tone, “Is the way he posed his portraits. In his time, most portraits were painted silhouette style and it was quite static. He purposefully had his sitters twist their bodies as if they were mid-motion. Sometimes these are quite subtle, others violent, but he does it almost every time. It is part of why he’s remembered with so few surviving works.”

“Fascinating,” said Aurore, and sounded like she meant it. Maybe that was something you were taught as a genteel young woman, though. He wondered if Enjolras could read her and she could read Enjolras, and they could each tell when the other was bored out of their wits and pretending not to be. Since they were such old friends.

Well, it wasn't his fault they'd come here. It might be the devil's, but it wasn't his.

“Oh, look at that,” said Enjolras suddenly from his shoulder. Grantaire felt the hair at the back of his neck rise, but for once his hands did not shake, just continued steady on.

“I cannot look, you idiot,” Aurore sighed at Enjolras. “If you wanted me to watch Monsieur Grantaire draw, you should have posed and let me be the one to rest _my_ chin on his shoulder.”

Grantaire kept his mind carefully, carefully blank. He thought of light, of movement, of the ways yellow silk reflects a glow onto the soft underside of an upper arm. The depth of black to use to make her eyes striking enough that even if she had no real interest in art, she would think herself made pretty enough to be pleased with it.

“He can draw Amantine, then we can both watch,” he heard Enjolras telling Aurore from over his shoulder.

“But it is so fun to be thus admired,” teased Aurore, voice deep, throaty. Grantaire shaded a curve of elbow with exacting, exacting care and did not grit his teeth, because it would make his shoulders tense and then his range of motion would be off, and perhaps he would make a mistake. Was she flirting? She had been introduced as a ‘madame’, and unless she was widowed _very_ young, she was married. Perhaps it was just a lady’s fun. Perhaps she did not care that she was married. Perhaps it meant nothing between them - but my God, he had never heard anyone so much as tease Enjolras before! Not unless you counted his own compulsive needling.

It was far too early in the morning for dark, embarrassed thoughts, imaginings. He thought, humiliated, that she somehow knew he was picturing them together, trying to imagine Enjolras’s face a moment before she stole a kiss, his hand on her arm, her arm low around his waist, gathering him to her.

Jesus God in Heaven, it was but half past six in the morning, but her dark eyes were knowing, perhaps still a little tipsy.

“Hold your face steadily now, please,” he managed to say. “Don’t look at me, look at Enjolras.” The slight upward shift of her gaze made her look like she had just been startled out of a reverie by a sudden presence. Well, he always did run towards the fire, metaphorically - “Look at Enjolras, perfect, and now…” he cleared his throat, “now think of a terribly wicked joke, but refuse to say it. Make him guess.”

This was extremely effective; her expression was as subtle as an actress’. Her eyes promised something delightfully terrible, her lips suggested mockery and promise all in one.

Against his better judgment, he took his time perfecting this expression with a little more artistic endeavor than he’d meant to put into this odd little sitting. Her face was not going stale, either, but he suspected that this was less to do with her talent as a model and more to do with whatever faces Enjolras was making behind him which were surely keeping her amused.

“Need I, euh, actually guess?” asked Enjolras, sounding strangled.

Without otherwise moving, she winked.

In another life I would be in love with you already, Grantaire thought miserably at Aurore Dupin, adding some depth of tone to the crown of her head.

“Done!” Grantaire gasped, signing ‘R’ with a flick of his wrist - not because he signed his chalk drawings, but as part of the joke.

Aurore leapt up, still startlingly athletic after a night spent in some ballroomt. Enjolras and she fought quickly over holding the paper; Aurore won.

“Oh!” she said, and the tone was not immediately clear, so Grantaire busied himself quickly putting away the chalk as if he would not need it again for work today.

“If you ever feel like doing a real sitting,” Grantaire called from across the studio, cowardly keeping his back turned. “I would be happy to arrange something more befitting, perhaps with myself or perhaps with Master Gros.”

“Oh, perhaps,” said Aurore Dupin vaguely. Grantaire swallowed a wince. It was odd - this was one thing he did know he was passable at. Day in, day out, he was as good as any other non-genius apprentice painter who could make a living this way. Yet he was acting like a girl showing Maman her first attempt at embroidery, or burnt cakes.

“Perhaps, but I want this one. Ève-Marie, let me borrow, euh - how much, Master R?”

Grantaire finally turned to face her. She was brandishing his chalk cartoon at him.

“I...can hardly charge you for a chalk cartoon. If...if you wanted a proper portrait, you might want to bring it to the studio again for reference, but otherwise it is merely a partial thing, of no real value.”

“You wouldn’t have to borrow from me if you hadn’t insisted on playing Villele at the gaming tables,” Enjolras sighed, digging out a few coins from his coat. “Will this cover it?”

“There’s no-”

“Ah, I can rely on you, Ève-Marie,” laughed Aurore, snatching two heavy coins from Enjolras’s gloved palm and clutching Grantaire’s hand in hers, then pressing the coins into it while she held his gaze like an Ottoman snake-charmer. She broke this seriousness with a yawn.

“Come Ève-Marie, I am afraid it is finally time to strike out for home. And if it’s not you who shows me to the door, Monsieur Dupin will be displeased with me.”

Enjolras raised an eyebrow at her behind her back, and Grantaire accidentally caught his gaze. Whatever thought had been going through Enjolras’s head was immediately shuttered from his face, which was as blank and beautiful as an old Roman statue.

“I’ll first say farewell to Mademoiselle Amantine,” he said.

“Do not neglect Monsieur Grantaire,” she replied simply, with another wink.

Shoulders tight, Enjolras favored Grantaire with a very stiff nod, patted the peach basket, whispered something quick, and was out the door, Aurore Dupin sweeping out on his heels.

For a beat, Grantaire sat in silence. Then, Amantine began to stir in her blankets.

“Oh,” Grantaire sighed at her, “ _Now_ you choose to wake up. Let’s work on your timing, sweetheart.”

After all that, the rest of the day was disturbingly normal.

***

“Thenardier,” Sophie-Philip called. She had between her hands a pretty little jewelry chest, a cheap thing she’d gotten secondhand. Inside it however had been two earrings with very small pearls, her gift from Luc’s sisters to celebrate their wedding.

Her maid made her way up the stairs. Patiently, Sophie-Philip waited.

There was no knock on the door but Thenardier came in. She was wearing the earrings; Sophie-Philip had only checked for them after she had seen this.

Wordlessly, she tapped the top of the jewelry box.

The maid did not even try to deny anything, or apologize.

“What is it? You’re too grand a lady to lend out a bauble?” the maid asked, arms crossed across her chest. A test, Sophie-Philip thought, but what is she testing? Merely what she can get away with? The efficacy of blackmail - does she know, does she know about the little girl?

“And why do you think I would lend out my baubles?” Sophie-Philip asked, voice completely flat.

“You’re just some chit them fancy students used to call pretty names,” accused the maid. Sharp tongue, sharp hazel eyes. “What was it? Floréal? Miss Flowery? You ain’t the type of girl what’s supposed to be nobody’s wife.”

Sophie-Philip’s spine froze at the name Floréal. She did not allow herself the hesitation.

“Poulin did not tell me your first name,” Sophie-Philip mused, cold inside; cold outside. “Pray tell, what is it?”

There was a long, long pause. Sophie-Philip really thought she might not answer. Concerned, she quickly tried to calculate how far Thenardier could go before Sophie-Philip should fire her.

Finally, the girl pursed her lips and said, “Eponine.”

Another pause. Sophie-Philip’s fingers tapped out a beat on the jewelry box.

“That is good,” Sophie-Philip said, finally leaning forward, like they were sharing some intimate confession, two sisters sharing a pillow. “You see,” she whispered, “I did not want the word Thenardier in my mouth any longer. Like you said, I’m a chit from the Saint-Michel. I know when a name tastes bad.”

The girl reared back. Sophie-Philip had expected more disgust, but there was just the shock, and an odd openness. She almost felt bad, like she had meant to level a friendly warning - well, friendly in terms of the Saint-Michel and the slums - and landed a threat instead. She stared the maid down, lids heavy, face impassive.

“Well then, you may finish borrowing my baubles and replace them whensoever you are ready. That will be all, I think, Eponine,” she said finally.

The next morning, the pearls were back in the jewelry box. Sophie-Philip watched closely, but instead of growing bitterness from losing that round, Eponine Thenardier seemed, oddly, more comfortable. Like they were men who had had their scuffle and sorted everything out in a few punches.

Whatever worked, Sophie-Philip thought, and went back to penning a pretty thank-you note for a dinner party invite.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- "La Joconde" = The Mona Lisa. Grantaire holds Leonardo in v high esteem, but Caravaggio is his artistic mancrush.
> 
> \- this was particularly fun to write
> 
> @ astronicht on twitter!


	8. In which there is a nunnery incident

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: in this chapter a character is put in an uncomfortable situation regarding their gender identity; full warning with minor spoilers in endnotes.

For the first time since she’d arrived in the little apartment in the Faubourg St Germain, Amantine slept longer than Grantaire. It didn’t quite make up for the two nights of crying which preceded it, and Grantaire’s treacherous body woke him as the bells of the nunnery four streets over rang out, echoing the bells of some tiny church in the distance. On quiet days, sometimes Grantaire would swear he could hear the Notre Dame ring. Not today. It was a Saturday in full bustle, and to his mounting concern, the nunnery bells rang eleven times.

Grantaire stumbled up swearing, but swearing softly. Amantine snuffled in her cradle. He tumbled around _en chemise_ , pulling on trousers and a coat on without bothering with waistcoat, and his cravat barely tied under a scarf. Buttoned up all the way, no one would see. And if they did, they would be too busy with his other oddities – from his unfortunate sobriety to his wild hair to his punched-in face, to the baby girl he would carry tucked into a peach basket over one arm – to notice his half-dressed state.

Look, he thought, a bit bitter and a bit wry, I too can be a sunny optimist.

Grantaire didn’t bother with opening the shutters, hoping not to stir Amantine and not quite ready to surrender their quiet little world to the outdoors. He hurried to pull his boots on without bothering with stockings. He was sleepy and warm and the food markets would close within the hour.

Hastily he ducked down his stairs, waved vaguely at a few neighbor-children in the hall, and stole out into the muddy courtyard where his new goat awaited the morning milking. He checked the feed trough she shared with the neighbor’s goat in the little goat shed, and broke the ice on the water trough outside. Other than another neighbor’s chickens, no one bothered him. His goat so far mostly approached him with bored equanimity.

Back up the stairs with the steaming milk-pail, stumbling shivering into his warm rooms to find the baby blinking slowly at the ceiling.

He kissed both of Amantine’s cheeks quick and light, and then remembered his morning stubble and worried that she’d be waking up to a scratch, until she blinked blearily and gurgled at him. She tried an almost-smile, her little petal mouth soft and happy. Someday she would be old enough to smile for real; the thought was a hot shard in his chest.

Grantaire gave her a knuckle to suckle while he unwrapped her one-handed and tossed the soiled rag onto the basket on the windowsill, where at least it wouldn’t stink up the place until he got the chance to clean it.

“Ah, what joys I have to look forward to,” he said to Amantine, who ignored him in favor of wrapping a tiny fist around the finger he’d provided, claiming it as her own. She burped sleepily and frowned as he pulled on her secondary wrap, pinning it in place as quickly as he could, before she had a chance to pee on him. He was starting to feel like a professional.

He didn’t bother to dress her any more than he had himself, but swaddled her up in the bolts of silk and calico which had taken over one corner of his rooms and tucked her into the peach basket.

It still didn’t look very respectable, but she fit quite comfortably. “Like Moses in the reeds,” he told her.

“Guh, guh, guh!” said Amantine, kicking her legs under her wrapping.

“Whatever you say, baby prophet,” Grantaire told her, and hefted her up, tucking his purse into his coat.

She fussed a little when they hit the cold air outside their building, so Grantaire ended up cradling the peach basket to his chest and murmuring soothing nothings at her, instead of holding it by the handle, which earned him a look from a few grisettes who had been pretending not to know him as they hurried towards the flea market, and a glance of intense jealousy from a young man, a bouzingo of the same sort as Bahorel or Prouvaire; Grantaire couldn’t quite recall his name; Gautée? Gouté? Whoever he was, his clothes were all inside out and he was clutching a rather large cane topped with an anatomically incorrect metal skull.

Grantaire tipped his hat in a long-buried reflex, and the Monsieur G stopped to squint at him.

“Excuse me, sir, but have we met? At the Brot Salon perhaps? What a mad coincidence.”

“Er, I didn’t attend,” Grantaire said.

“Madder still, it could be that I do not know this man at all!” exclaimed the bouzingo, and ambled into a promisingly gothic alleyway.

“Yes, yes, don’t look at me like that,” Grantaire murmured to Amantine. “This is your city, madmen and all.”

Paris was freezing but bright, the mud of the streets frozen over until it looked like everything from the ruts made by carriage wheels to the gas lamps had been rubbed down in white chalk.

Amantine’s nose ran, and Grantaire had forgotten his handkerchief at home, so he was reduced to surreptitiously wiping his daughter’s face with his own shirtsleeve.

“What do you think, prophetesse?” Grantaire asked her when they reached the boulangeri _e_ at the edge of the market square and dodged out of the crowd and into the warmth of the shop. “Baguette? Brioche? And something else – _salé ou sucre_ , mm? Do we like olives today?”

The baker, Grantaire’s regular, had seen worse from him. He’d once vomited all over the cheese baignets and passed out, a few years back, when he’d started drinking in earnest. He’d paid for the baignets and doubled the coin for the trouble. Asking a baby in a peach basket if she had an opinion on his purchase just made the baker-lady lean against the counter, bemused.

“Good morning, Madame Abramowicz,” Grantaire said with as much dignity as he could muster.

Amantine was not amused; she started to turn red, her little face changing color shockingly fast. Just as he was about to excuse them from the shop to perhaps spare the other customers, Enjolras walked in, a shock to Grantaire’s system. This was his acknowledged home turf; even Joly and Louis didn’t know this part of Paris as well as he did, despite their ardent love for his local cafes. This was his bakery, his slightly judgemental baker-lady, his usual crowd of customers side-eyeing him.

“How now, Ève-Marie,” sort of slipped out of his mouth, the presumption of the first name flopping awkwardly onto the floor between them. But Enjolras just smiled, and took a few economical strides towards them, and dropped a kiss on Amantine’s head. She seemed dazzled by the knot of Enjolras’s cravat, or maybe Enjolras himself; she’d mercifully forgotten to cry.

Grantaire stared dumbly as Enjolras murmured, “Good morning, Citoyen Amantine.”

It was probably several years of drunken brawls that made Grantaire notice the man by the baignets stiffen, and glance again at Enjolras.

In the crowded warmth of the bakery, Grantaire’s stomach sank. Enjolras was still bent over Amantine, his yellow hair falling down around his face. The tips of his ears were red and his hat was at a jaunty angle.

Enjolras glanced back towards the door and Grantaire hoped that he was about to turn and leave, that the tall man with the soldier’s stance and the stiff shoulders would lose interest. Instead, Enjolras said, “There you are, I was beginning to think you were lost,” his voice almost laughing, a hand still casually on Amantine’s stomach.

Grantaire thought, stomach flipping, me?

“No, no,” replied a cheerful Louis Joly from the entry, bundled in three tartan-print scarves, Louis Lesgles grinning at his side as they always were. “We have what you asked for, but it was a terribly long walk for us from Courfeyrac’s place - euh.”

Joly cut himself off just as Louis grabbed him by one of his scarves. Both their eyes were locked on the tall man. Grantaire experienced a prolonged sinking feeling.

The tall man turned to the door, and suspicion turned to recognition the moment he saw the two Louis. He looked between the four of them quickly. Grantaire did not appreciate his inclusion.

Enjolras, instead of shouting an order, turned to stare at Grantaire, mouth agape, almost horrified. For a moment suspended Grantaire wondered what he had done to deserve such a look; did Ève-Marie think Grantaire had sold them out? Grantaire was here for a fucking loaf of bread, thanks, none of this malarkey with police spies and unknown materials currently being transported from Courfeyrac to Enjolras.

The tall man raised a hand, pointed a finger at the Louis, and said, “You there, come with me!”

Then Enjolras seized Grantaire in an iron grip around his forearm and shoved him and Amantine towards the door, leaving him with little to do but follow the momentum of this madness and run pell-mell out into the street after Joly and Louis, who hadn’t stuck around to hear the end of the sentence. Grantaire gripped the peach basket up against his body and tried to keep up without jostling her too much, but it was horrible, it felt cruel, and she was crying that loud, frightened sounding cry. Ève-Marie kept his grip on them and Grantaire was forced to follow along after.

Down the street, the tall man had acquired a partner, who had been loitering outside the shop; together they raced after them.

Ahead, Louis Lesgles shouted - “If we make the market we can lose him and cut back to Musichetta’s! What say you, Enjolras?”

“Lead on!” shouted Enjolras, and sounded half-laughing again, vital and alive. For once, Grantaire was not moved to distraction by this. He reached out as they cut into an alleyway and grabbed and handful of Enjolras’s coattails - a metaphor for another time - and hissed, “Enjolras! Enjolras, slow down.”

No response; they whipped around another corner, stumbled through horse manure and a small flock of hens in front of a row of medieval slum houses. Joly tripped over a hen and stumbled, gasping. Lesgles grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him up.

“Ève-Marie, stop now or _you will hurt her_ ,” Grantaire finally yelled, heedless of the footsteps echoing maybe a hundred yards behind in the crowd.

Grantaire had taken that authoritative a tone quite possibly never before in his life. Certainly never addressing Enjolras. It was that or the name or God knew what that made Ève-Marie spin on his heel and catch Grantaire as he came careening after. Amantine screamed on. Lesgles and Joly halted a little ways away, shifting from foot to foot, nervous, their breaths fogging in front of them.

Calmly, Enjolras surveyed the scene, listened to the shouts.

“You know _canne de combat_ , can you fight them?”

“Are you out of your senses?” Grantaire shouted, trying to shush Amantine, pulling her from her basket to rock her gently. She screamed still, beating her fists on his face.

Enjolras’s eyelids fluttered; he appeared to think very fast. Grantaire saw the moment he came to a decision: he grit his teeth.

“Fine. Quickly now, I know a place.” And he let go of Grantaire and hurried on, Joly and Lesgles falling in step behind. They came out in a narrow back alley that stunk something fierce, stone walls only as far apart as their shoulders and vines growing over top. They could hear their pursuers pause behind them to debate the route.

“Dieu en Ciel, are we near the Bieve? That is an awful vapor,” choked Joly.

“Try coming out from under your scarves,” whispered Lesgles, whose pale skin had taken on a decidedly green pallor.

Grantaire thought that they would crouch there in the stink and hope Amantine’s crying would be taken for any of the other babies of the slums. But Enjolras led them on, expertly picking turn-offs and forks.

“This is ruining my illusion of you,” Grantaire panted, mouth running without much input from the mind, in his standard panic mode. “The smell alone has done it.”

Enjolras snorted.

“Not much further now,” he told Joly, who was limping a little from the fall over one of the chickens several streets back.

“To what?” gasped Joly.

“Ah - This,” Enjolras said, stopping suddenly. The ivy was particularly thick on the claustrophobic walls around them, snagging Grantaire’s curls. “In her youth my sister attended the convent on the other side of the wall. She found this when we were younger.”

“You used to sneak into a convent?” Grantaire demanded.

“Are you really going to question my morals right now, Grantaire?” Enjolras asked. “Joly, you first.”

“Why me?”

“You have a sister?” Grantaire said, high pitched, but was ignored. On his shoulder, Amantine screamed on.

Enjolras rolled his eyes. “We haven’t spoken in years. Joly, it’s right there, can’t you see it?”

“No,” said Joly, squinting at the ivy. Grantaire, though, saw a hint of paler stone, broken open and crumbling.

Crossly he said, “Oh, just let me go first, no nun is going to arrest a man with a baby.”

No one looked convinced, but Grantaire found that he was determined to leave an alley that smelled like shit and was throwing echoes on echoes of Amantine’s crying back into his ears. He was half dressed under his coat, his hat was lost to the ivy, and he hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before. He’d prefer a nice quiet coffee house, but a nunnery would do. Anything would do.

Amantine secure between his arm and shoulder, he shoved his way through the ivy. His hands met cold stone.

Then, through the leaves, he came face to face with a person, a pale face inside the wall. He screamed.

The girl screamed too, and Amantine thrashed in his grip. In a moment of heady terror, he thought he would drop her. He leapt back and cracked Joly on the jaw, nearly sent the four of them all tumbling, but only saved himself at the last moment.

“What in the everloving pestulant donkey-fucked hells are you doing, Grantaire?” Louis Lesgles shouted in honest confusion, and then added a few more choice phrases showing a stunning mastery of the finer points of the French language and its myriad uses.

“I don’t know about you,” piped up a voice from the other side of the wall, “but I am escaping.”

There was a beat of silence.

“This way?” Joly asked weakly. The girl emerged from the ivy. She wasn’t quite a girl at all, Grantaire realized, probably around Aurore Dupin’s age, just under her twentieth year. She was very pretty, though her head was wrapped in a black scarf and she wore an isorassa, or what looked like it had been a scarf and isorassa before her venture half-through the wall, and now resembled a turban and a lopsided jacket, under which they could see the hem of a calico print dress in pastel green. She had a strong English accent to her French, but spoke very properly.

“Are you a nun?” Joly, who had been raised by parents who never really recovered their Catholicism after the Republic, and was a little vague on these sorts of thing.

“Novice,” Grantaire and the girl said together. They shared a glance.

“Or, I’m dressed like one, anyway,” the girl said. “Now, I’ll be on my way.” She started to climb towards them when something on the back of Grantaire’s neck prickled. Instinctively, he looked at Ève-Marie, and found his eyes already on Grantaire and Amantine, hawklike.

A  pistol shot rang out in the alley.

The girl fell back through the wall and Lesgles grabbed Joly and leapt through after her. Ève-Marie gripped Grantaire’s arm again and all but hurled him and Amantine through, and leapt in after them. Another shot sounded; over the smell of dung they smelled gunpowder.

“Who the hell uses a pistol at a time like this!” Joly hissed. “There are houses here!”

Lesgles said, “Oh Lord, mademoiselle, are you alright?”

“Fine, I’m sure,” she said faintly from the grass. The appeared to be in the orchard gardens, barren and frosty. “But I do believe I won’t go that way.”

“Rachèl, is Amantine alright?” Enjolras demanded in a tone so harsh that Grantaire didn’t even understand the question at first.

“She’s afraid,” he said slowly, over her crying. “And I would like to know what is going on here, and why we’ve been included in it.”

Footsteps rung out in the alley.

“No time,” hissed Ève-Marie.

“Oh,” said the girl, looking at Grantaire, “are you being...er, what is the term - mugged?”

He looked down at himself. His coat was half-undone, his cravat now completely untied, his scarf dangling from one shoulder, his shirt untucked and waistcoat missing.

“Ye-es,” he said slowly.

Her delicate face hardened.

“I don’t like thieves,” she said. “I know a trick. Get behind the holly hedges, over there.”

“Mademoiselle -” Lesgles began, but Joly stumbled on his bad ankle and he was distracted in holding him up. Lesgles eyed the distance to the holly hedge and elected to pull Joly partially behind a brush pile instead. Enjolras shared a complex glance with Lesgles, then tugged Grantaire and Amantine across the orchard and behind the hedge, pushed them in front of himself, and hissed “- go!”

“Through there - no, idiot, the loose brick - there!”

The sound of the ivy thrashing, and from the hedge they watched as the girl drew herself up, white-blonde hair loose and head wrap discarded, and shouted in a perfectly tremulous voice.

“Sirs, one more step and I will scream!”

“What the -”

“There’s a girl, this is the fucking convent.”

“I will scream!”

“Keep your mouth shut-”

“I said I would scream!”

And she did. It was scream that would make the stars of the Odéon rage with jealousy - high and clear and shrill enough that it seemed it could’ve broken a glass, if one had been provided. In a dramatic flourish, she brandished the crucifix around her neck and once she’d gulped in another breath, called out - “Thieves, thieves in the garden!”

“We’re with the police, miss, we’re-”

But already the orchard was being flooded with women in black, several brandishing long canes, and five excited convent girls had picked up shovels from what looked like a kitchen garden and raced to the aid of the girl - and inadvertently Lesgles and Joly, who were not very hidden behind their brush pile.

Forgetting all their convent training entirely in the excitement, they raced past the frozen Joly and Lesgles and leapt towards the girl, who was retying her headcloth and melting back into the girls behind her. A shovel missed one man’s face by inches, and they elected to retreat swiftly via the alleyway.

A voice penetrated the cacophony, every word stressed with deep disapproval. “What is this,” it demanded. Voices quieted to a murmur; the sea of women parted. The convent girls dropped their shovels and sheepishly trudged up to kiss a tall woman’s hand. Enjolras twitched beside Grantaire, where he was curled slightly around Amantine.

“Is one of the ones with shovels your sister?” whispered Grantaire. “I could believe that, I think.”

“No,” Ève-Marie murmured.

The stately nun cast her eyes around, and addressed the convent girls.

“Did you see them.”

Somehow when she asked a question it did not come with a question mark.

“Yes, Mother. Well, just one’s nose, really.”

“Courine nearly got him!” one eagerly explained.

“Who raised the alarm?” the nun asked. The girls looked at each other.

“I didn’t know her. A novice, I think,” said the girl who looked the eldest.

“Very well. Back to your lessons, I believe. None of you are allowed out here at this hour.”

They nodded, and trudged back the way they came. The rest of the crowd began to break up as the young, stately nun spoke with Joly and Lesgles, who were violently apologizing for their trespass.

Suddenly the girl appeared back behind the holly with them, finger to her lips. She beckoned them with one hand, and they followed her, crouched between the holly and the tall convent wall. They crawled along the side of a sprawling wing of the nunnery, in a cracked shutter. They found themselves in a room bursting with old clothing. Amantine was quieter now, but somehow more inconsolable. She whimpered, ragged. It made Grantaire feel quite possibly the lowest he ever had. That feeling seemed to be transfiguring into absolute hot rage towards all his friends.

“Listen,” said the girl, “I will help you, but after your must help me.”

“Must we,” said Grantaire, dry as bones.

“An exchange of favors among equals,” Ève-Marie said. The girl reached her hand out like a man, and Ève-Marie shook it without so much as a blink.

“My name is Euphrasie Fauchelevent,” the girl said. “What do you need today?”

Ève-Marie’s lips thinned. “One of our friends who we left in the garden is carrying a secret letter. It must not fall into the wrong hands.”

Grantaire didn’t bother hiding his raised eyebrows.

“I do not require an explanation, monsieurs. But may I ask, euh.”

“This is my daughter,” Grantaire said. “We were out at the bakery.”

“Well,” said Euphrasie, “Your friends will be with the Mother Superior. She likes to take care of convent business on her own, without outside interference.”

“Then she will not have called the police?” Ève-Marie asked, casual.

“Not yet,” said Euphrasie. She looked around the little room. “I suppose you think you could go and just say you arrived and heard your friends were in a spot of trouble? Goodness, I wish. They would be perfectly cordial, but you would be escorted off the premises. Come, there’s only one reason she’ll let you in beyond the front hall, and even then-’ She broke off and peered at their faces in turn.

“Well,” said she, “I suppose we had to have a little luck today. Did you both shave this morning? Never matter, if you want to see the Reverend Mother, put these on - quick!”

Grantaire stared at the garment in his hands. It was a dress in black cotton, meant for a tall woman, he supposed. Ève-Marie was staring at his own bundle blankly, like it did not make sense.

The girl shrugged at them. “Secret letters and chases through back alleys - now you need a disguise. Also, it’s nearly the Advent, and the Reverend Mother is seeing women for blessings all this week. It’s a madhouse out there, so you have a chance, if you’ll take it. These are dresses we’re donating to the poor, I think. They won’t be missed.”

Grantaire had lost the peach basket in the chase, so pulled a pillow off the one chair present and placed it on the floor as a makeshift bed. Amantine fussed at being away from him; Euphrasie shushed her awkwardly, a girl not used to children. Her voice was a singer’s voice, a light little soprano, however, and something about it was soothing enough that Amantine was distracted again, and Grantaire and Enjolras stepped behind the provided carved screen.

Grantaire was inclined to be angry at Amantine’s involvement but find the whole thing ridiculous. He turned a sardonic smirk on Enjolras before they did more than untie their cravats, only to find Enjolras’s face frozen, his eyes glassy, his hands still in the folds of his cravat like an exquisite statue. Grantaire thought, unbidden, of the sculptor Bernini who carved The Rape of Proserpina, who spent so much love on showing in stone the press of Pluto’s hands in the flesh of the back of Proserpina’s thigh.

That was the effect, the impression, of Ève-Marie’s hands frozen at his throat. Grantaire had always appreciated Bernini, had thought that statue a work of genius. There had always been that repulsive element to it; that violence. He had never been quite so repulsed by it before, however.

“I can do it,” Grantaire heard himself say, so low his voice was just a whisper of silk on stone, his own cravat falling from his neck, wanton.

Still Enjolras did not move. His eyes, however, flicked to Grantaire and away.

Maybe if Grantaire had not spent so much time watching the unspoken cues of an infant, if he had not spent so many months wondering how he had missed Floréal’s secret for so long, he might have been behind this screen trying to needle Enjolras, to tease him about his delicate manliness that could not even survive donning a skirt.

Grantaire did not know why, or what was the matter, but saying any of those things just now felt like - like the imprint of fingers on Proserpina’s thigh, like bile rising in his throat.

“I don’t mind,” Grantaire heard himself say, “I’ll put on the clothes and go see the Reverend Mother and get the papers from Joly; you wait here with the girl and watch Amantine.”

Ève-Marie’s blank look turned grim, and he still looked queesy, but he also looked like he was breathing again.

“No,” he said, steely. “No, it’s better if I go too. I’ll do it.”

Grantaire nodded and kept his mouth shut.

They turned their backs on each other and spent an awkward minute very carefully pretending that they were not pulling on petticoats. Grantaire had done set painting for a small theatre troupe back in his little hometown, and thus knew how to button a dress on a man or a woman. He did not dare see how Ève-Marie fared until he heard a throat clear, and saw Ève-Marie done up in a perfect illusion of yellow cotton and lace. His own efforts seemed suddenly sloppy.

“Fix me?” Grantaire said weakly, instead of anything else. Ève-Marie looked startled and wary, but stepped over on silent slippered feet and did something to Grantaire’s bonnet. He tugged forward two of Grantaire’s black curls to frame his face, and tucked the rest up.

They came out from behind the screen and the girl inspected them frankly. She looked a little surprised at Enjolras, but Grantaire had already known how pretty a man Enjolras was; he was only as shocked by it as he ever was.

Grantaire held out his hands for Amantine and she nervously returned her.

Quietly, Ève-Marie said to Grantaire, “Bite your lips,” and reached out to Grantaire’s face. For a moment, Grantaire was frozen, transfixed. Ève-Marie hovered close, then suddenly and savagely pinched Grantaire’s cheeks, right above the bone.

“Ow! Jesus,” Grantaire said, jumping back, only guiltily remembering the convent girl. She flapped a hand at him, unconcerned with his blasphemy and fascinated by proceedings.

“Now,” said Ève-Marie with an evil, terrible grin that was all him, and not feminine _at all_. Grantaire felt his stomach swoop. “Bite your lips, and you’ll look pretty.”

Grantaire bit his lips and tried to look pretty.

The girl giggled softly, and led them out into the hall.

The convent was only a two-story building, but built over so many centuries that there was almost no way to go in a straight path to anything. They went up and down three separate staircases and through a bit of remodeling before they came upon a long, dark-panelled hall lined on one side with leaded glass windows. At the end of the hall was a tall wooden door, edged in brass. The girl knocked, loudly.

A nun opened it a crack. “Our Reverend Mother is busy at the moment, Euphrasie,” she said.

“She will want to see these ladies,” the girl said, somewhat obviously blustering.

“Euphrasie, you would do best to return to your dormitory. The Reverend Mother will be with you ladies in a short while, if you will wait in the visitor’s parlor. There has been a disruption to attend to.”

Enjolras smiled and stepped forward. “My name is Ève-Marie Enjolras,” he said, voice an octave higher than usual.

“Enjolras?” said the nun.

“The very same,” smiled Ève-Marie. It was a fairly unnerving smile, Grantaire thought.

“I am sister Magritte, I am very pleased to meet you. And you, euh?” she turned to Grantaire.

Ève-Marie stared wildly at Grantaire. Grantaire could _not_ do that fancy voice trick, thank you very much. Ève-Marie was starting to panic, Grantaire could see it in his eyes, when finally the girl cut in.

“And this is, is Emily St. Aubert! Her French is not very good, she is, euh, the nanny. I believe. It may be necessary that I translate for her.”

Grantaire choked, and tried to swallow it. He attempted a little curtsy. Fortunately, Sister Magritte had eyes only for Ève-Marie, and apparently never read Gothic novels.

“Please follow me, Mademoiselle Enjolras,” she said, and rushed off, three following in her wake.

The room they were led to was large and lit from high windows, but due to the dark winter day some sconces were lit. The young Reverend Mother sat at a heavy desk, severe and beautiful even in her wimple and stern black. She was pale, and heavy rings clicked on her long fingers. She did not look like the sort of woman who would take kindly to two grown men sneaking into her nunnery in women’s clothes, Grantaire noted. He jiggled Amantine a little more manically.

“You may go, Sister Magritte,” she said. The old nun left them.

“Sister,” said Ève-Marie to the Reverend Mother in his perfect facsimile of a feminine address.

“Actually, euh, a regular nun is a ‘Sister’, but she’s the Reverend Moth-” Grantaire whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

“...Sister,” replied the Reverend Mother to Ève-Marie. “You appear to have had a change of heart. Or is Mother in town?”

Ève-Marie glared. “Don’t start,” he said, very much in his own voice.

The girl stared at Grantaire like he’d been holding out on her. Grantaire had a coughing fit. Amantine made a screechy sort of laugh, because of course she’d inherited Grantaire’s ability to react incorrectly in awkward social situations.

This finally tore the Reverend Mother’s eyes away from Ève-Marie.

“Madame… St. Aubert, I am told. I am Eujolie Enjolras. And this is?”

And suddenly the strangeness of the scene crystallized. Older and severe, younger and bright; they were an odd sort of mirror, especially with Enjolras in that dress. Even the way they stood was the same, and their odd, harsh beauty.

“This is Amantine,” Ève-Marie said in a rush, his voice losing some of the odd flatness that had colored it. He made a strange gesture, and Grantaire automatically passed over the baby, who was unsure about Ève-Marie’s bonnet but went happily enough. Lord, he grew a three-day beard that time and she threw fits, but bonnets were totally acceptable. He would never understand.

For the first time, Reverend Mother Eujolie’s calm, polished facade stuttered and broke.

“Not...not yours?” she said, some strange feeling in her voice. Ève-Marie hesitated, glanced up at Grantaire, glanced away.

“No,” he said finally. “We’re here to find some friends of ours. I believe you apprehended them in your garden?”

Eujolie Enjolras almost looked disappointed, Grantaire thought.

“Well. Yes, there are two young men in the antichamber. Shall I bring them in?” She eyed Ève-Marie’s dress.

“No!” Ève-Marie almost shouted, also staring at his dress, “I will go see to them. Are they to be arrested?”

“They must at least give a statement. I may not press charges.”

“Thank you, Eujolie,” he said stiffly, and drifted to another heavy door, slipping inside without even allowing Grantaire to see their friends.

“Euphrasie, you may go as well,” said the Reverend Mother. The girl slumped and gave Grantaire one last meaningful stare before slipping out of the room.

Grantaire was left alone with the Reverend Mother.

“I actually speak French fine, if plainly,” Grantaire ventured. “Also, my name is Rachèl Grantaire.”

His voice was not feminine, and his name only was in the mouth of the occasional confused Englishman. Oh well. “And this is my daughter, Amantine Antoine Grantaire.”

“I don’t suppose you are here with grievance, or for an Advent blessing,” she said.

“Well,” said Grantaire, “I suppose I could use one, if I were honest. But really I just got wrapped up in this.”

“And what is your relation to my… sibling?” she asked carefully.

“Ève-Marie is a friend. He helps me with the baby, sometimes.” Let her make of that what she would. He had no qualms about exaggerating the point a little.

“I’ll admit I’d never seen Ève-Marie with an infant before. There appears to be some attachment.”

“Well,” said Grantaire, deciding to just react to this entire day at another time, or perhaps never, “I mean, Ève-Marie picked her name, after a friend I understand. Perhaps that started it.”

“A friend? Oh, of course, her. Hmm,” she said. The antichamber door opened, and Ève-Marie himself slipped out, sheaf of papers in hand.

“I have no idea where to put these,” he griped, groping through his skirts in search of some sort of pocket. Grantaire rolled his eyes.

“Oh, give them here,” he said, and unceremoniously stuffed them down the front of his blouse. “In my search for your Republican Motherhood, my child can now suckle at the teats of the language of freedom.”

He was rewarded with Ève-Marie dropping his face in his hands.

“If you would be so kind, dear sister, please refrain from reporting any of us to the government. My friend here makes jokes in very bad taste,” sighed Enjolras.

“Honesty is in terrible taste, I understand,” the Reverend Mother said, wry. “At least meet me for tea next Tuesday morning.” She addressed this to them both.

“I’ll consider it my confessional,” said Grantaire, spotting an out, and dragged Ève-Marie out by the arm before he could refuse, or say or do basically anything else.

As soon as the door was closed, Euphrasie came running around the corner, much to the annoyance of the secretary.

“I hope you had a lovely chat!” she said, grabbing Grantaire’s hand, and tugging with more strength than he’d expect from her. “Come along, I’ll show you out! You must be so tired, maybe some tea? A sweet!”

“Are you going to escape again?” asked Enjolras mildly once they reached a mostly-abandoned corridor. She turned up her nose at them.

“I could hardly manage it today; your policemen are all over now, thank you very much. But I want you to go to Rue Plumet, and tell my father, Monsieur Fauchelevent, that I am not being improved by the convent and miss him terribly. I cordially request to be taken home.”

She stomped her foot slightly at the end of this speech.

Despite Euphrasie’s grim insistence that they keep up the disguise as they left, Grantaire was quite nervous enough with the policemen at the entrance, though he wasn’t sure if they were their earlier pursuers. The younger of the two, however, mostly stared at Euphrasie, who Grantaire realized was probably quite a beauty.

“Will you fulfill my request?” Euphrasie asked them solemnly at the gate.

“I will do so,” said Ève-Marie to Euphrasie, one general to another, agreeing on a flanking maneuver in the field.

“Then it is decided,” Grantaire said. “And I for one am going home.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- a man not wearing a waistcoat to go outside is akin to, idk, wearing a bikini in a grocery store. Grantaire is sloppy af.
> 
> \- in an 1826 police chase, there are fewer explosions and more tripping over chickens: an historical fact
> 
> \- FINALLY HERE COMES COSETTE. Going by Euphrasie, still.
> 
> \- that Bernini statue Grantaire is referencing is /insane/ in artistic terms, also creepy af, and Grantaire is being a 19th century hipster by even mentioning it, bc Bernini was super unpopular at this point. Bernini was like the Nickelback of sculptors, ok? ok.
> 
> @astronicht on twitter
> 
> **(Warning with minor spoilers)** A trans male character is put in a position where he feels he needs to dress as a female in order to help a friend in trouble. He is not forced, and is only once addressed as "sister" by a character in the text, but he is noticeably uncomfortable for the duration. Please contact me if you feel this could be handled differently.


	9. In which Grantaire goes to work

Grantaire had intended to avoid everyone he knew for roughly a week after this, but upon returning home, stomach still empty, still wearing his awful gown, he was met by his jaded portress and given to understand he had a visitor waiting in the courtyard.

Grinding his teeth, he went. And there he found Master Antoine-Jean Gros scowling in a coat for which he was almost too fat, feeding the wrong goat apple slices.

His eyes lit on Grantaire. They were not reassuring.

“I see you are grievously ill, as I suspected when you failed to arrive at the studio this morning,” Gros said in a very flat tone.

“You’re feeding my neighbor’s goat. Mine is over there,” Grantaire told him helpfully. His arms were aching from carrying Amantine on his shoulder instead of in her basket so he did not bother to point.

Gros snatched the last apple peice away from the imposter goat, which lunged for the treat. In a temper, Gros threw the apple. It thunked against someone’s window and the goat trundled away to retrieve it.

“Come with me. Wait, no. Go upstairs and change into clothes fit to be seen in, then come with me. Where did you even get that gown? No, I don’t care. Get out of it, Rachèl, and hand her to me. You’ll go faster if you aren’t fretting over her every expression. Yes, just hand her over.”

Gros had held Amantine before without total catastrophe, so Grantaire relented. The skirts were drafty and Grantaire was cold. Also, he wasn’t all that fussed about being seen in women’s clothes, but today he’d been seen by Enjolras, Enjolras’s older sister, his own daughter, and Master Gros, which amounted to a nightmare he probably once had at age fifteen.

Grantaire dressed thoroughly this time and grabbed the milk pail on his way back out. It had been two hours, and Amantine would be uninterested in waiting to be fed.

He found Gros back in the courtyard, face stormy and eyebrows in their bushiest configuration, holding Amantine and pointing at things, saying, “Window! Washing line! Manger! Goat! Dungheap!”

Without commentary Grantaire went straight to his goat and began to tug her udders. Gros could just watch if he wanted to; it was nothing Grantaire did not do in the studio’s front garden already.

Largely, Gros ignored him until he straightened.

“You forgot her basket,” Gros informed him. Gros’s gaze originated in light brown eyes. If he had let them, his eyes would be light and pleasant and rather pretty, like amber or honeyed wood. Gros considered them limpid and foppish and did his best to glare as much of the time as possible.

“It was lost in the market,” Grantaire hedged.

“Hm,” said Gros, still staring him down. Silently, silently staring.

“Let me take her back?” Grantaire tried.

“Hm,” Gros said again. “Hm, no, actually. You must be _tired_ from holding her in your _costume_ while the two of your gallivanted around the market. I shall carry her. It is not far.”

And Gros turned on his heel and left, forcing Grantaire to clutch the milk pail and follow.

Not far turned out to be the Cafe Giovanna, which Grantaire had not realized Gros knew about, in part because it was relatively small and smokey and served largely students and an unseemly number of working girls, and in part because never picturing Gros here was an act of self-preservation.

Because his luck knew what was expected of it, he and Gros walked in just as Ève-Marie Enjolras closed the door on one of the private back rooms, and from the bigger back room emerged Ciprian de Courfeyrac, several men Grantaire did not know, and Jacqueline.

Gros and most of Grantaire’s compatriots took no notice of this horrible collision, but Grantaire and Ève-Marie froze across the room from each other. To Grantaire’s shocked dismay, Enjolras’s face had taken on that almost-gone glazed look again, and a flush rode on his cheeks.

The others must have come here to regroup, but he’d come here, Grantaire understood suddenly, to change. That little back room doubtless contained the crumpled remains of the pale yellow dress.

If anyone had asked Grantaire a year ago, a month ago, this morning before he got up - how would you feel if you saw Enjolras in women’s clothes, he never would have replied, “Like I am witnessing an act of violence,” and even if he had heard himself say it before now he would not have understood it.

It was not necessary that Grantaire think through the particulars of this line of thought. He was never good at grasping particulars or facts. But he was an artist; truths he understood. It was a truth that today never should have happened, that Grantaire and Amantine had been done a disservice and put in danger, but Enjolras had been wronged in a way Grantaire was not fully equipped to understand but in one which was very real.

Why, why had Gros had to bring him to the Giovanna? God, in that same little back room where the yellow dress lay, Grantaire had once drunkenly put his head under Jacqueline’s skirts while she clawed at his hair and told him what a bad show he was.

God in heaven, Grantaire thought, looking between Enjolras and Gros, now was _not_ the time. Enjolras shook his head as if to clear it, and with the smallest flicker of expression at Grantaire he went to join de Courfeyrac.

“Rachèl!” barked Gros, and Grantaire went to the little table Gros had chosen, and was finally able to take Amantine back in order to feed her while Gros demanded oysters and hot coffee. Anything sounded good, right about now. The goat’s milk sounded good.

The coffee arrived quickly, and Grantaire counted his few blessings that Madame Giovanna the younger had learned not to bring him wine as soon as he walked in the door anymore. It didn’t stop him from glancing across the room at Jacqueline’s glass with longing, but it saved him an even worse time of it with Gros, whatever was coming. And something certainly was.

“Rachèl,” Gros began, after taking two strong gulps of his coffee. Grantaire would dearly like to drain his cup, except he needed both hands to feed Amantine. He stared hard at his coffee, willing it to wait for him, to understand the depth of his need.

“The studio has received a new request to bid for a commission,” Gros began in his gruff way, speaking mostly to his own coffee-cup.

Grantaire’s dark curls were getting long; one strand of hair was in his eye. He tried to rub it away with a shoulder. “I’m glad?” he said. “You need to accept it. I’ve read over the accounts Filipo’s been doing for you, and we really cannot afford to be picky. If you would only consider branching out into lithographic prints to expand our customer base-”

“It is a fresco in St Severin,” Gros said.

Grantaire had finally taken a huge gulp of coffee. Now he was choking on it.

He saw someone standing to peer at him from the far table where his friends sat. “Are you alright, R?” that someone - probably Ciprian de Courfeyrac - called. Grantaire sighed and buried his face in the hand not holding Amantine.

“St Severin?” he managed to cough out into his napkin.

“I feel if we can convince the proprietor to take us on, you and Filipo will have less to dog me over regarding the accounts. The full length of St Severin’s nave should be ample, I think.”

“We’re - we’re oil painters!”

“And so says the apprentice who was just telling me to start scribbling bad copies of my own paintings for a print run!” Gros shot back. “If you’re not interested or able to be my right hand in this, then I will go and tell them myself that we are declining to submit our bid. If you want it, then you will come with me, now, to St Severin, and tell the curé that you are my most promising apprentice and together we will submit a winning bid. And then you will crane your young neck staring up at the damnable walls of the place so I don’t have to.”

“What’s this, you’re going to paint St Severin?” exclaimed a voice from behind him. De Courfeyrac, of course.

“Only if he gets to the church by two o’clock he will,” rumbled Gros. “Rachèl, who do you leave Amantine with?”

Grantaire stared at him, blank-faced. “I take Amantine to the studio,” he said. “Every day. I thought you’d noticed.”

“Don’t be catty with me,” growled Gros, ignoring that Jacqueline and finally Enjolras had come up to join Courfeyrac in rubbernecking. “Who do you leave her with when you’re busy?”

Most of his friends had held her at one time or another across the couple weeks since her arrival. But that was not what Gros meant.

Until Grantaire had acquired the cradle, he had carried Amantine with him to the privy in his own building. A nanny? The concept seemed as distant as the moon.

“I’ll bring her to St Severin,” Grantaire said.

“You’ll bring…? No, Rachèl, not to meet a client, especially not one who is the curé of a church that can trace its roots back to the fifth century.” His lips thinned under his long nose and he added, quieter, “I do not say it to be cruel. But the height of respectability and professionalism will be expected. If the bid is accepted, who shall be able to talk if you bring her with you when work is underway. But for today only, surely you must have someone?”

Grantaire’s throat worked.

“R,” said Enjolras’s voice. Grantaire did not want to even turn to look at him. “Rachèl, I owe you for this morning.” It was so quiet suddenly that he thought he heard Enjolras’s throat click. “I’ll stay right here, I won’t move from this spot. She can stay at the Giovanna and your friends will be here. No - no madness like this morning. That business is all taken care of. And Jacqueline and Ciprian are here, and - and I shall send a note to Barack. Or perhaps - perhaps you prefer Barack. He shall be sent for. Ciprian? Yes, it is done.”

“I told you before, Ève-Marie” Grantaire said slowly, then made himself twist so he could see Enjolras standing with his arms folded, stiff and awkward. “I told you before, that first time you called at my home to lecture me, that I trusted you. And I let you carry her home from Musichetta’s. Call for Combeferre if you wish, but, euh. It’s alright.” He looked down at Amantine. “You’ll stay right here?” he asked in a voice that sounded too vulnerable by half to his own ears. Yet, he thought, even if he did not understand half of what he had seen at the convent, Enjolras had just been equally exposed. It felt like equal footing. It felt like an olive branch that absolutely must be extended.

“Do you -” Enjolras coughed. “Do you forgive me then, for my part in the...difficulties this morning?”

“Your apology is accepted,” Grantaire managed to choke out, and managed not to add that he was astounded to receive it. That he _had_ received it was what gave him the ability to unlock the crook of his arm and pass Amantine over to Enjolras, who smiled at her and signalled to Ciprian that he and Jacqueline could go back to whatever discussion was occuring in the corner, but that Enjolras would stay behind until Grantaire and Gros left. Their oysters had just arrived, so Grantaire figured he must have a little time before Gros would be shoving them out the door.

Gros was, of course, staring at all of this. What judgement he rendered or emotion he felt was unknowable from his face.

Enjolras took a chair a table away, adjusted his top hat and used his handkerchief to wipe at Amantine’s face, where milk inevitably dribbled. He did this exactly the way Grantaire did, down to a slightly uncertain tap with his knuckle on her cheek as he went to re-dip the rag. It was as if he had watched and memorized. Perhaps he had; Grantaire had seen him stand in the street with the rest of their friends to listen to an orator in the market, and later repeat back all that had been said, with the inflection largely intact. It was strange to see that brilliance brought down to a mimicry of Grantaire's hands, his movements.

“Eat your oysters, Rachèl, you idiot,” Gros said.

Grantaire ate his oysters. When he was done, he glanced up to find Gros staring at him and sipping his coffee. “Bid your farewells,” Gros ordered, and busied himself with his coffee cup as if to give Grantaire some privacy.

A bright blue eye watched from a sweep of blond hair and top hat as Grantaire approached. Grantaire did not have the courage to say much more to Enjolras. Instead he bent over Amantine and kissed both her cheeks. “I’ll be back soon,” he told her. “Very, very soon.”

“Best of luck with the, erm, church,” he thought he heard Enjolras say, quietly and rather awkwardly. He did not know what to say back, so he fled.

St Severin was not a small church. If Grantaire had attended mass with any regularity it would have been his parish church, but that was just part of the magic of this city - that he could by all rights attend in his normal, weekly worship a great an ancient thing, could kneel and murmur and take the sacrament where Parisians had been doing so for as long as Christians had lived on the banks of the Seine.

Built in its current iteration in the gothic style of the early thirteenth century, the occasional lost tourist had been known to confuse it for Notre Dame, or at very least a cathedral. It had all the squat flying buttresses, the gargoyles winding their way along the roof, long and thin like hunting dogs, the belltower that flew high over the neighborhood. Down the center aisle, below its geometric vaulted ceiling which from here looked like so much folded paper, stained glass windows with their white-and-gold saints on bright blue marched in double rows, one above the other. These, too, were medieval. Grantaire had a sudden, horrified vision of breaking one with a scaffold.

Well, he thought, win the bid first and worry about destroying hundreds of years of history after.

It was Saturday and a mass was in fact ongoing at the front of the church, but they were meeting the curé at the far end from the altar, so they were quite far from the parishioners in all.

A minute ago, outside the grand doors, Gros had stopped in the whipping wind to yank Grantaire’s shirt collar, cravat, and greatcoat into order. He had not bothered much with Grantaire’s hair, just shoved his hat further down onto his unruly corkscrew curls. It had been nothing like standing in front of Ève-Marie and saying, “Fix me,” but it had felt like an echo anyway.

Now, striding behind Gros into the church, listening to the way his boots struck the flagstones and echoed up to heaven, he felt like a creature transformed, a changeable thing. Instead of feeling monstrous he felt it agreed with him. He enjoyed the firm way his greatcoat buttoned tight around his stomach and flared out at his hips until it came to rest around his knees. He liked the way he had to hold his neck in his collar and cravat. He liked that he could go from the dress to this and back again if he so pleased.

All of this was only a little ruined by his twitching every half-minute or so when he suddenly missed Amantine’s weight on his arm. He was just doing it again when Gros stepped on his foot and smiled at the curé who came out to greet them.

“Baron Gros,” the man murmured, “Thank you for coming.” The curé was a tall, thin man, pale-skinned with a shock of white hair, his movements athletic and his eyes sharp.

Behind the curé clasping Gros’s hand, Grantaire spied a young man just leaving through a far door. As Gros stepped back, Grantaire stepped forward and murmured, “That was Delacroix’s apprentice just going.”

Gros’s bright eyes flicked to him, and away again. He smiled at the curé and said, “May I present my best student and personal apprentice, Rachèl Grantaire.” The curé offered his hand and Grantaire, lapsed as he was, kissed his ring out of muscle memory. The curé looked very faintly pleased as he stared down at Grantaire from his long patrician nose.

“Walk with me, if you please,” the curé said. His robes swept the floor as he strode off. Grantaire took a deep breath, smelled in the incense, heard the murmur of the congregation responding to the sermon. They strode into the nave, where the roof was lower and intimate, where the architecture of the church played with shadow the way the main aisle danced with light.

“It is these walls we want decorated,” the curé said with the simplicity of a man who did not particularly understand art, but certainly understood that that was what he paid the artists for.

Grantaire paused as Gros walked on with the curé. There was stained glass here too, but very little direct light. Candles and sconces would be used heavily, especially now in the winter months. The light from the stained glass was largely blue, dusky. He wrinkled his nose; golden light would have been better. The blue might make a fresco feel sickly, cold, or distort the color. The arched ceilings were beautiful up close, a mere ten feet up instead of a hundred. There were nooks, a chapel. Thoughts unfurled and were dispelled. To make an illusion of the sky, like a baroque ceiling painter? Would they let him go so far as to have tumbling bodies painted going down the wall towards the floor? Or no, that was gauche. Continue the architecture of the church in a painting, place the saints worshipping alongside the parishioners? Or - or perhaps go older, Byzantine and Medieval. Gold curls and furious angels with streaming blond hair, deepen the natural shadows, paint the sensual agony of Saint Sebastian. Yes, something like that. What else, what else? He had never been a fresco painter, but the size of the canvas whispered to him.

He pulled a grease pencil and scrap of paper out of his pocket, began to scribble quick phrases, jot down the angles of the ceiling and the smooth curves of the columns.

“Grantaire,” Gros called, and he looked up to see both men paused in their promenade and staring back at him. He tried to read the curé’s thin face. The man seemed focused on Grantaire, maybe intrigued, maybe pleased. Grantaire wondered if Delacroix had come here too or merely sent his student. He wondered if the student had taken notes, or if he’d been chatty, pleasing.

Grantaire bit his lip.

This was not just a chance for the studio, or for Grantaire to paint something new. Not far away in the cafe, Amantine waited. If Gros got this commission, Grantaire could pay for tutors by the time she might need some. If she wanted to sing or learn piano or advanced mathematics, he could pay for a teacher.

He smiled tightly, and thought - be charming, be witty, be sober, be professional. He thought - what would Floréal do, here, if she were a young man? How would she smile, how would she tip her shoulders with confidence?

It was armed with this concept that Grantaire navigated the rest of the meeting, with shoulders unhunched, voice soft and clear, words just eccentric enough to appear artistic without being gibberish. He ignored the way Gros boggled at him when the curé’s back was turned, once miming, 'Are you drunk?' rather unsubtly. Perhaps once, in his meaner days, Grantaire had wondered if there wasn’t some wickedness, some lie, in Floréal’s touch for this, in her ability to playact for an audience. He did not think he could keep it up the way she did, but just now from the inside it looked like a skill, like a trade.

And all the while he kept his eyes on the walls that were to be painted, his eyes on the light and shadow, on the perspective. An idea began to take shape in his chest, but even to Gros he did not dare sketch the shape of it.

Before long they were bowing and taking their leave, and Grantaire was saying on the steps, “I shall have some sketches for you on Monday, maitre, we will come in early I swear!”

Gros did not get a word in before Grantaire leapt down the last step and trotted off down the street lit in soft evening light.

***

Luc knocked on the door of their bedchamber, and it swung partially open at his touch.

“Are you ready, my dear?” he asked mildly. He surveyed the room, lit by a branch of candles in the predawn light, its shutters still closed and the little fire in the grate a small comfort against the general chill. Instead of his wife he found the maid squatting by the fire. Perhaps she had realized how miserly it was, and was attempting to build it up? Luc hoped so.

“The Madame’s still busy with her toilette,” the maid informed him.

“In fact I am done, Eponine,” called his wife’s voice. She emerged placing small pearl earrings in her ears. Even in the weak, cold light of a November morning her complexion was golden, her lips dusky pink, her silky black hair coiled to smooth perfection in a topknot with loops, over which she carefully settled her best bonnet. She looked, Luc thought, like the illustrations of the princess from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, only she wore petticoats and blue wool.

“Lovely as ever,” he told her, and held out his arm.

They went away for morning mass; after, Sophie-Philip scanned the little church anxiously without looking like she was doing any such thing. The restriction at the corner of her vision which her bonnet provided was unhelpful, but if she tipped her head just so as if she was admiring the oil paintings in the little nave or the ancient beams of the ceiling she could cast her gaze across the milling crowd. The service was over and the doors were being opened, much to the chagrin of the parish, for it was very windy.

It was not a big church, but it was quite lovely in an old-fashioned sort of way. The stones were whitewashed and the ceiling was decorated in gold and precious metals, with the occasional fresco barely squeezed in. What interested Sophie-Philip the most were the people, however. This was her first time attending a service at her new parish, as Madame Poulin. These people - the ones milling now, this new middle class, not necessarily the ones with their high and mighty family boxes soberly trailing out - would be her set, her social sphere.

While she had done everything in her power to look impeccable, respectable, youthful and good-humored, she felt uneasy. Luc stood silently at her side, for he was unsure in some social situations that did not involve work, or at very least a supply of port and cigars. She was frustrated that his awkwardness had seized him now, but nothing to be done - she murmured hastily in his ear, “M’sieur, is that not Monsieur Cludot?” Cludot being the head of the bank where Luc worked.

Luc’s face unfroze and he smiled and hailed Monsieur Cludot, saying, “So it is, Madame Poulin. You have a good eye.”

Cludot approached with an affable smile, but Sophie-Philip noticed that his wife stayed behind with a knot of older bourgeoise ladies who whispered cordially to each other from behind their veils. She fixed a smile on her face and was all attention when Cludot approached. He looked rather like a cartoon of an old, fat middle class businessman, and was quite polite to her.

As Cludot bowed over her hand there was a titter behind her. Cludot moved on to Luc and Sophie-Philip pretended to drop her glove and stooped to retrieve it. The tittering ladies were close behind her, and their eyes were on herself and Luc.

Cludot was saying something but Sophie-Philip did not follow it. Had she been overconfident to hope it was just her terrible maid who saw her as an imposter, little better than a prostitute, who had ensnared for herself Luc Poulin and a house on Rue de Mer? She felt pinned between them, the young wives behind her and the matrons in front, all staring at her and thinking they knew who she was and why she was here.

And always the worry - did they suspect about the child? She had only left for five months, for she had pushed it as far as she could until her condition was almost obvious. But she had reappeared and so had the painter’s apprentice with the baby.

She had to trust Rachèl.

“She was a grisette, you know!” said a louder voice with the titterers.

“Hush, Camille, she will hear you.”

“I do not care! Why should I be ashamed, when she’s just a girl who was too frail to be a prostitute and too lazy to make a living?”

 _So this is your opinion of Sophie-Philip Poulin,_ Sophie-Philip thought, staring doggedly past Cludot at the matrons. And here she had fought all this way to earn a little dignity.

She breathed as deeply as she dared and tilted her head again, really looked at the architecture this time, murmured something about the baroque style and how in the right places it still delighted her. Cludot said, “Oh, my wife must invite you to dinner, Madame Poulin! She does love to talk of the arts, and all she hears from me is this talk of this newfangled stock exchange.”

Sophie-Philip had some doubts about receiving that particular invitation. Too bad, for exposure to Rachèl had schooled her in all the latest of artistic discussion, whether she was interested or not. She had never really considered it a virtue before.

She watched vaguely as a young woman about her own age approached Madame Cludot without so much as a whisper passing through the crowd. This woman too was fashionable, her hair dark and curled, her gown all velvet in a dark, alluring blue with a matching bonnet. She was fairly obviously receiving an invitation from Madame Cludot at this very minute, Sophie-Philip thought sourly. She turned her gaze away, stared up at the ceiling again, at the windows letting in the winter light.

Give me a year, she thought, tasting stubbornness like blood in the back of her throat. Give me a year and I will make all of them sing for me.

She looked down again to see that same young woman in blue velvet bearing down upon them. “Oh,” said Cludot, surprised but recovering, “May I have the immense pleasure to introduce -”

“Pleasure to meet you, Madame,” the woman spoke over him, extending her hand as if she expected Sophie-Philip to shake it, “I am Aurore Dupin.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- St Severin is a super lovely real life church in Paris, and Gros totally saw enough Italian frescos while on campaign with Napoleon that he could maybe be considered for a commission like this?? just let me handwave
> 
> @ astronicht on twitter


	10. In which the baby bottle is invented

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally done with my transatlantic move and started(ish) on another bout of academia! I tried to hammer out the rest of this chapter to get it done and posted and get back into the swing of writing, so it's not as edited as I'd like. There might be small changes as I come back and edit, nothing major though :)

In the world of Rachèl Grantaire’s fashionable acquaintance, there were two camps wrestling for control of The Arts of the day. These two were as at each other’s necks as a British Whig to a Tory, or a French Ultra to a Red Democrat.

Well, technically there were three camps, if you counted the old-fashioned Neo-Classicists. Grantaire did not count the Neo-Classicists. He, along with any other long term member of Baron Gros’s studio, had a long-held hatred for the late Jacques Louis David, under whom Gros had apprenticed, and who had tried his best to convince poor, youthful Gros that this newfangled Romanticism was the antichrist; in struggling to follow his advice, Gros had choked the natural evolution of his painting and choked his talent as well, until he was left slopping together society portraits and yelling at students. It had been like bearing witness to an impressively drawn out divorce, where Papa tried to make Maman feel like it was all her fault for wanting to draw a dramatic mountain every once in a while.

So anyhow, two camps - or clubs, in the English. There was the Grande Cenacle, the majority party, comprised of a bunch of well-to-do young men, the likes of Hugo, Nodier, and other vaguely conservative royalist bigwigs who cared most about the Romantic. The Petit Cenacle was, of course, comprised of about the same political and artistic opinions, only from the mouths of disgruntled rejects from the Grand. 

This was the necessary context to explain why Ciprian de Courfeyrac called the meeting in Barack Combeferre’s apartments their own Cenacle of the Petit Tit, much to the mingled horror and amusement of various attendees. (Rachèl suspected Ève-Marie, who only heard about it later, thought it crass, but approved of the pun).

The day of the Cenacle of the Petit Tit started off the way Grantaire would later recall most of that November: sharply cold, oddly bright. The days were certainly shortening, the cold was a brutal thing, but anytime the sun was up it was like standing in the light of one of Barack Combeferre’s glass prisms. It was effusively bright, and pretty, and made one’s nose run something ferocious. 

On the particular day, shortly after the Convent Incident, it was simply too bright and too cold to stay in his rooms, and the studio was shut so Gros and all his students could dodge Mass on their own time, so Grantaire collected his cavalcade of goat, milk-bucket, milk-rags, change of shirt (a precaution), red chalk, charcoal sticks, sheaf of papers, notebook, purse, the new peach basket, the warmest of Amantine’s miscellaneous fabric collection, and finally Amantine herself. All of this was bundled into the Cafe Giovanna, save the goat, who got to wear Grantaire’s ratty old greatcoat (now replaced by the greatcoat which had mysteriously appeared on his person in the Tuileries at the beginning of all this) as a sort of horse blanket. She was told to wait outside and please not bite the potter’s girl again.

There was a delightful dry heat in Giovanna’s, and the light scent of woodsmoke, for a fire burned in the grate in addition to the sconces. Grantaire sat by the window, where he could see the sunlight and also his goat, in case she took a dislike to any passersby. She usually did.

A mulled wine appeared at his elbow, and it was wine in name only, not in function, and it brought joy anyway. It was probably a giddy exhaustion - he’d been up the last two nights so late that he’d barely noticed Amantine as an interruption to his sleep; her feedings, fitful and drawn out as they were with the rag and bucket, were quiet interludes when he could stop sketching and focus entirely on her, and the way her little face screwed up when she wasn’t getting any more out of the rag, and how sometime she would get distracted following strange points of nothing across the ceiling, or try to look at where Grantaire’s face was.

He would not speak for hours at a time during these long November nights. He left many, many candles burning. And everything he did for her he did with his left hand, to give his right sketching hand a break. The bones in his right wrist creaked, his fingers were fixed as claws around the chalk. But his left was warm and supple; he left it tucked into the blankets he drew around himself in his chair while he worked. That hand was soft, unstained from ink when he forgot himself and picked at the end of a pen. 

He liked, he found, being a left-handed man.

Grantaire and Amantine were there for perhaps two hours. Mademoiselle Giovanna came by to tell him what he should paint in St Severin (it was bloodthirsty), followed by her mother Madame Giovanna (more nude angelic men than even the infinitely repressed Michelangelo would have considered). Then, piles of young men from the university shoved their way in at midday, yelling for coffee, for pickled eels and bread, for boiled eggs and the soup that was only made at Cafe Giovanna and then only in the winter months, which had a secret recipe and involved pasta shaped like tiny stars and a lot of black pepper. The working girls who could go home or to a cafe for lunch - most, except those placed in service in some great house or another and high enough placed that they used the servants’ dining rooms - trudged in as well, looking for one-centime potatoes and a friend to sit with.

Grantaire had some river trout, doused in lemon juice in the new style, but mostly he drank his mulled wine, then his coffee, then more coffee, until it was fizzing through him and his brain felt as bright and hard to look at as the icy day outside.

In came a burly acquaintance - Bahorel-somebody, who could beat anyone in a fight. With him came a laughing Irish woman Grantaire did not know, and they had a merry whispered conversation in the corner. They were either on a romantic liaison or planning a heist, from their tone; Grantaire nodded to Bahorel and let them be. And then came a sleepy young woman who stuttered shyly to Madame Gio, her accent strongly English. Grantaire looked up sharply, but it was not Euphrasie Fauchelevent again; just another wanderer come into the Giovanna.

“She’s an actress!” Mademoiselle Giovanna whispered loudly to him as she made her rounds clearing the crockery. The girl took tea and milk, nothing else, and said in careful French, “I am just waiting for my friend Aurore Dupin.”

Grantaire swallowed, tongue suddenly thick, and eyed the safety of the back rooms. Before he could make a move, however (and why should he avoid Madame Dupin? She had never done anything offensive, not even strange) the door swung again. He had been expecting his friends around this hour, so it was not much of a shock: the two Louis and Senora Giulia, dressed resplendently as La Musichetta, who seemed to know the foreign girl. That made sense, if she were a fellow actress.

Amantine slept through the rising chatter, miracle of miracles. Anytime her nose wrinkled or she began to fuss in her sleep, Grantaire reached over and laid one hand on her belly and let it sit there until he thought she was calmed by the warmth and the comforting weight. Sometimes he left his hand longer, worked one-handed while he felt her heartbeat, her quick little breaths. He let his gaze slide up from his sketches after a while, to watch the tidal heaving of the cafe, to watch the flow in the street outside, gently interrupted as locals steered clear of the goat and curious children crowded closer.

Oh how love had snuck up on him - love for this place, for this particular blend of coffee, for this city and its wealth of emigrees and strangers, its students of medicine and students of dance halls, its old-timers frowning at the encroaching city in the outlying villages, like Montmartre Village where beer was cheap, and the wide-eyed Englishmen eager for a tour of a continent that scant years ago had been totally cut off by Napoleon. Its museums of homemade and stolen wonders, its way of slipping from summer to autumn which he had only half noticed this year but now felt so apparent. It started with the orange-girls who appeared in October with wagonettes of fragrant citrus, and around the same time the Jewish quarter rang in the new year, and if you were heading to the theatre you could hear the singing, and if you walked down the streets you could even hear the softest shiver of the finial bells ringing out in the ornate crowns that decorated Torahs. And now it was already November, and she was already here! Here, and his, and tucking into his life now like the careful pleats Floreal could sew into a sleeve.

This love for the city seemed to him to be one and the same as his love for Amantine. He could describe Paris better than he could describe her, but no matter - everything she tried with her new eyes to look at he looked at too, and in loving her he began to love what they looked at together.

There was an excited shout down the street, muffled through the windows. Grantaire, head bent back down, took no notice until the door swung open and the excited shouting started coming from indoors as well. He looked up, expecting the Louis were up to something, or Ciprian, but saw Barack Combeferre instead, calling, “Ciprian, it’s here!” in much agitation.

Grantaire’s first thought was that the cholera was back. But then he caught the profile of Combeferre’s face, and his wide, crooked grin. Something in his gut unclenched, and Amantine sighed expressively at him from her basket. She was blinking solemnly at the ceiling. His tensing hand must have woken her.

“Hello,” Grantaire said to her, very quietly, but was quickly distracted again by the commotion at the door.

Barack was normally very put together in public; he was no Ciprian-esque dandy running about in enough layers to drown Ophelia, a top hat that scraped the occasional doorway and a cravat knot that took fifteen minutes to tie. But he was eminently tidy in a way that spoke to his military education at the polytechnique and - Grantaire privately thought - likely an overbearing father figure.

Today however, he was dashing about - calm Monsieur Combeferre, dashing! - in only his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, his dark skin sharply offset against his white sleeves. There were what looked like burn marks on his cuffs, and his wavy black hair, normally brutally combed into a rigidly European, slightly old-fashioned style, was standing straight up like he’d run his hands through it for several hours.

Amantine wriggled and punched the side of her basket with a little fist, making some sort of AH! Noises in what might have been a very unflattering imitation of Barack’s excited speaking. He had by this point ascended almost entirely into Arabic. Ciprian, the apparent ricipient of all of this, was standing at his table in order to better withstand the gale-force Barack, laughing so hard that he was wiping tears from his eyes and leaning on Louis Joly’s cane for support.

“My darling man,” said Ciprian between snorts - he tried to be an attractive laugher, but it had never stuck, “I thought you had turned lead to gold when you came in here spouting off like that. I demand wonders from you, and you tell me you’ve invented a mechanical udder?”

Ciprian, pink-cheeked and curly-haired, would have looked like a flushed laughing cherub except for the ridiculous way he wrinkled his nose and the way when he was really laughing his mouth hung open in silent laughter. Another flood of Arabic came forth, this time in a decidedly scolding tone.

Ciprian just laughed again, and under the staring eyes of everyone in in the Giovanna, he seized Barack by the shoulder and waist and waltzed him forcefully across the main floor, until a tangle of young men came to rest in front of Grantaire and Amantine.

Like a showman announcing the next act, Ciprian presented Barack, and whatever Barack held in both hands, in a sweeping gesture.

Grantaire reached over to pick up a now squirming Amantine, thinking maybe she would like to see instead of being stuck looking at the ceiling. She burrowed her head into his chest instead, headbutting him in the clavicle in the process. Oh well - he couldn’t really bruise through the collar of his greatcoat and this was nice, too. Amantine snuggled up with a grip on his waistcoat button and Grantaire leaned back in his chair, a steadying hand on her back. She sighed.

“Can I help you, gentlemen?” Grantaire asked finally, quirking a smile.

“Bari has something to show you,” Ciprian proclaimed proudly, dropping his head affectionately on Barack’s shoulder. Even in his heeled boots, Ciprian was shorter than almost all the boys,  _ and  _ Jeannette.

“I can talk, Ciprian,” grumbled Barack, but he was still vibrating with giddy energy. Then he grinned again, and Grantaire was again taken aback. Irma Boissy had spent three months last year madly in love with Monsieur Combeferre, and Grantaire was beginning to see why.

“Did you forget, Monsieur Grantaire?” said Barack. “When you first brought Amantine to see me, we discussed the options available to those who require an alternative to a wet nurse. And you got the goat, which has done quite well! Really, should the goats-milk remain a success someone should write a modern medical treatise on it.”

At the mention of the - mysteriously acquired - goat, Ciprian looked a little shifty, but could not resist adding, “You know, Bari, maybe  _ you  _ should write it.”

Barack waved him off. He was intent. Grantaire could only sit there clutching Amantine with wide eyes and let them do what they would.

“Since our conversation, I have been applying myself to the issue in my spare time.”

“Spare time?” whispered Ciprian weakly, looking askance at the side of Barack’s head.

“While the wet nurse is an ancient and invaluable profession, in finding an alternative society has been shockingly remiss. So I made one. Or, I made a dozen or so, but this is one of the better prototypes. Will you submit to try it? Or, ack, have the mademoiselle try it? And the others, they’re at home, but we should test which of the best is the ideal for infants. If they work for the mademoiselle Amantine, perhaps they could be used in the orphanages, for the foundlings! Science and technology must work for everyone, you see. Would you please submit to it?”

“Euh,” said Grantaire, because processing that many words after long hours alone only with Amantine was proving difficult. Barack’s face began to - not fall, exactly, but lose some of its light. Grantaire blinked rapidly.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course we’ll try it.” A flutter in his chest, at the idea of an alternative to the rag and bucket method, to Amantine always seeming so hungry, never quite satisfied. “I’m - Combeferre, I didn’t realize you were working on something like that this whole time. I’ll, euh, I’ll provide the rightful compensation for your time.”

Barack just smiled. “Why, thank you, but I’m afraid accepting payment would invalidate the scientific process.”

“Wha-”

“It’s very critical to remain ethically pure.”

“I’m pretty sure-”

“Oh, for the love of the Virgin and the Book,” interjected Ciprian. He gently shoved in front of Barack and held out both hands. Mechanically, Grantaire straightened and transferred Amantine into Ciprian’s expectant grasp. He was trying to be better about letting other people hold her, for fear that he would reveal just how much it scared him. And because Eve-Marie, true to his word, had kept her just fine while Grantaire was at St Severin.

Ciprian scooped her up with alacrity and began to coo at her, admiring what was left of her hair (a single shock of black fuzz, standing right up in the middle of her head).

“Let’s go to Bari’s and try out - there has  _ got  _ to be a better term than ‘mechanical udder’, Bari, that is  _ utterly  _ unviable in advertising. Unless I translated wrong, which I don’t think I did.”

“I’ll let you name it,” said Barack, unfortunately not thinking too hard about it.

“Who else is coming?” Ciprian raised his voice to ask the cafe at large. What looked to Grantaire like half the patrons stood up and started scrambling for their hats. Grantaire, seeing no way to push back against this force already in motion, sighed and started collecting their things. As he did so, he spied Ciprian passing Amantine to a delighted Louis Joly, who immediately began making horrid faces at her.

“Ciprian!” Grantaire said, clapping Ciprian’s shoulder. “You can help by leading the goat!”

Ciprian and the goat turned as one and met each other’s eyes through the window, two combatants on a dueling ground. Grantaire just clapped Ciprian’s shoulder again and wandered off to try to seem fine with the fact that Amantine was now being handed to Bahorel. Ciprian straightened his cravat and trudged outside to his fate.

At very least, they were leaving before the arrival of Aurore Dupin, thought Grantaire.

 

Once at Combeferre’s, the party coalesced and the worst of the curious rabble wandered back to the university for an afternoon lecture. Those that stayed Grantaire recognized. Young Jean Prouvaire was there again, and smiled shyly at Grantaire from where he stood awkwardly next to Bahorel, who was telling a joke to the bemused lady with him, who obviously didn’t know any of them but found them all highly amusing. Jeannette hadn’t been able to come for longer than it took to do the walk before she would be expected back at the factory where she painted ladies’ fans. Possibly she’d just come to watch and make sure Grantaire was not mistreating his goat, but in her shadow came Jacqueline, somewhat surly like she was some days, and she came up to Barack’s rooms with the rest. Louis Joly was by the window, stopping Louis Lesgles from knocking over a crystal paperweight, though their Signora Giulia had stayed with the actress to await Madame Dupin. Ciprian was pulling a shrieking, near-dry kettle off the fire in the grate and kicking at a few escaped ashes. Combeferre left - Grantaire didn’t dare follow, for fear of finding more than just his newspaper collection - and burst back in with his arms full of his contraptions.

Many of them were made of a thick, clear glass in a few variants on the shape of beakers one would see at the chemist’s. They then had, instead of corks, a variety of attachments around their necks, some of which were elaborate, some simple, one or two completely bewildering. One was definitely the lip of a hookah pipe.

There were already pitchers of milk on the table - nice’s cow’s milk, too, which Grantaire had to admit he rather missed. Other than Jacqueline, who slumped by the window and ignored everybody, they crowded around the work table. Amantine in her basket was a tiny squirming thing at center stage.

The fresh, warm milk was poured into each contraption in turn. 

“How have you tested these, Bari?” asked Lesgles, idly turning over the one with the hookah pipe attachment, squinting curiously at it.

“I tried them myself, of course. The neighbors’ mother told them they aren’t allowed to help with experiments anymore,” replied Barack.

Grantaire let them talk and went hunting for a chair not covered in books. He was noticing how tired he was.

“You drank from them?” exclaimed Joly. He couldn’t go pale, exactly, but he could clutch the cravat at his throat in a very gentlemanly and aghast way.

Barack grinned again. Maybe it wasn’t just Grantaire who was silly with lack of sleep. “But of course! If I don’t trust them used for myself, how could I trust them for the mademoiselle?”

There weren’t any chairs without books, nor the bed in the nook, which was also covered in books - and an assortment of early 18th century star charts, and several pamphlets on the education of the youth somewhat sloppily typeset, and a few pamphlets from the Amies du Peuple. 

Oh dear, thought Grantaire, at least the newspapers weren’t illegal. Pamphlets from the Friends of the People certainly were. 

That could explain, he thought, where Enjolras disappeared to sometimes. Enjolras _ and  _ Combeferre, it seemed. Under lowered lashes he glanced swiftly at Ciprian de Courfeyrac, his head tossed back, laughing merrily at something Bahorel’s lady friend had said. It was impossible that Ciprien did not know what his two dearest friends were doing. He thought of Ciprien’s chin resting on Barack’s shoulder in the Giovanna, his ease with both of them, his father a - Grantaire scraped his memory - a duke, perhaps?

Grantaire stumbled over to the chair next to where Jacqueline had stolen the only seat - a stool by the window - and began piling its horde of books on the floor. These were in Arabic and delightfully incomprehensible.

“So you see,” Barack was saying, “The last was a better shape, but she’s drinking much faster from this one.”

“Make sure to burp her,” Ciprien interjected.

Things seemed under control. Grantaire slumped into the chair, watching Amantine sample her feast. There was varied success on the parts of the feeding bottles; the intricate were not well loved, but a few elicited intense focus. Everyone leaned forward to watch as Amantine’s brow furrowed and she sucked at one of the prototypes.

“That one, then,” said Barack into the silence, once the milk was gone.

“You have invented,” Ciprian said with great weight, “the world’s first Miniature Tit.”

“Oh look!” said Joly, “She’s going to sleep.”

And so am I, Grantaire thought, in the same weighty tone as Courfeyrac’s. Then he did.

Both Grande Grantaire and Petite Grantaire asleep - “No, Ciprian, you have to say ‘Grandetaire and Petitaire’, it’s better” - Barack continued to tinker with the prototype. Bahorel and his lady friend left before long, and Jacqueline went with them, but Lesgles, Joly, and Jean Prouvaire stayed and poked around Barack’s strange tangle of . Prouvaire was delighted to find Barack’s pickled pig heart, turning the glass over and over in his hands, frowning.

“It’s  _ not _ secretly a human heart,” Louis Joly told him, because Louis Joly was just a bit allergic to Romanticism, and especially when it led to romanticizing the body parts he’d had to see in mid-summer dissections. Jean Prouvaire just flushed and didn’t say whether he’d thought it, but he did put the pig heart down.

Prouvaire moved on to a set of windchimes Barack had hung back by one of his desks (he had three in the room, and the work table). Prouvaire quite liked them; they were a simple sort of beautiful. Under all his opium-eating and outrageous friends, Prouvaire was sixteen and a good poet. That was a hard and rare thing to be. Often he was overwhelmed by it all, and so though he and Grantaire did not know it, they liked to visit Barack Combeferre for much the same reason. There was clutter, sure, but it was all bent towards a purpose, and often that purpose was simply that it delighted Combeferre. These seashell wind chimes were like that; simple and clean and enlivened with some purpose. There were letters of some sort scratched into them, Prouvaire realized.

“What is this, Bari?” Joly asked for both of them, tapping one. He sat back to let Prouvaire examine them, he and Lesgles lighting their pipes on the low-burning fireplace.

“What? Oh - those are lion’s paw seashells,” said Barack, barely looking up from his work table.

“No I mean,” said Joly patiently, “why are they strung up like this with the little marks on them?”

Barack pulled himself away from his work and tipped his head. He’d somehow managed to splatter ink on his left ear.

“Ah,” said he finally. “You see, those are the elements of the natural world.”

“Lions-paw seashells are?” Joly asked. Prouvaire climbed onto Jacqueline’s vacated stool and  tipped the whole production off its hook, then leapt down and took it to one of the windows for better light. He hooked it onto the curtain rod and shook his long black hair out of his face, prodding at the shells in the sunlight and listening to the soft tinkling.

“Technically yes, but - well.” Barack blew out a breath in a gust, thinking. “You see,  in 1789, Antoine Lavoisier published a list of thirty-three chemical elements. These he grouped into four categories: gases, metals, nonmetals, and earths. These are our modern equivalent to the air, water, fire, and earth of the ancients.” Joly was nodding along. He might not read science publications for fun like Combeferre, but he was training to be a doctor and at least attempted his required reading. “It is doubtless fascinating in its own right, you see, but since Lavoisier published, little more has been done to try to understand and further categorize these groups. I was trying to think how to do it, both in the structure and in choosing what aspects to catalog the elements by. I believe it to be like understanding groups of human beings; one must not only be able to predict what will happen when one group meets the other, but comprehend why and how. Thus we could categorize elements by action, as well as by their static state.”

“So why are they on seashells?” Lesgles asked, which seemed like the obvious question. In a group of scientists and poets, Lesgles was technically training for a law career.

“I believe that working in just two dimensions on paper limits the possibilities for categorization,” Combeferre replied, taking down the measurements of each of the favored bottles in turn.

“And euh, explain the bit about action?” Joly asked. He felt rather like when he was in class and should be taking notes.

“It’s like this: you see a rich man. He walks past a poor beggar. What will he do? Will he kick the beggar, will he give the beggar a coin, or will he walk past and interact not at all? The question can be asked of all elements, and all rich men. Only then can one know their character; knowing that they are rich is not enough.”

Joly chuckled a little, and said “That is quite the metaphor. Your holistic approach to your patients” (he indicated the elements represented on their shells) “always overpowers mine.”

“So these elements,” said Prouvaire in a quiet voice, petting one of the shells, “are they truly what makes up everything? Even our living flesh?”

“As far as we know, they and the aether are the building blocks with which God built the world,” Barack replied, smiling a little at the middle distance, or maybe just at the now low-hanging wintery sun. “They are the very root and source.”

There was a short silence, a comfortable one, even with Grantaire snoring in the corner and Amantine snoring baby snorts on the table. Prouvaire shook back his long hair again and slid his fingers through the thirty-three shells, thinking of the years of Christ and the living things that once must have inhabited a lion’s-paw seashell, perhaps a thousand miles away, perhaps so many leagues under the sea. When he held them up, the light that shone tenderly through them with a pinkish hue, like a thing alive.

“I am Baba Jaga,” Jean Prouvaire said. “I use the bones of the world for windchimes.”

Grantaire woke hearing this, which meant he awoke smiling.

Combeferre handed him one of the prototypes, somewhat altered. “Try this one at home,” he said.

“It’s called a Miniature Tit, not a Mechanical Udder” Ciprian asserted. “Remember that, for the patent.”

 

Grantaire delivered a polished set of sketches to Gros at eight o’clock on Monday morning. Gros stood in the studio doorway like a sphinx guarding a passage, if sphinxes in ancient Egypt were less like woman-headed lions and more like a man who had once been striking and still had the jaw but also a beer-belly. 

Gros had an expressive face, in that it moved a lot while he was thinking. It was thus very sneakily good at giving absolutely nothing away despite its constant movement. Grantaire, clutching Amantine’s basket in one arm and the goat’s lead in the other, shivered desperately on the studio’s stoop, among the mostly winter-dead little garden. Gros shuffled the pages  few more times. Cleared his throat. Looked at Grantaire, looked down. Looked at Grantaire again, for longer this time, head to toe.

“These are a passable start,” he said gruffly. “But there’s no way under Heaven I’m discussing them with you today. You look like you died of dysentery two days ago. Go the hell home, get someone to watch Amantine, and get at least a few hours of sleep by this this time tomorrow.”

Grantaire was swaying on his feet, and he wanted to protest except that Gros had said this just as he was sort of swaying backwards, so the momentum was against him and he was mumbling something and next thing he knew he was back through the little fence and letting his feet take him home to Rue d’Elephante with no conscious input from himself. 

With guilty relief he put the goat away and trudged up the steps. He made it to his door in time to see someone there, a hand poised and about to knock. It was Enjolras, dressed in his severe black. As Grantaire watched, he knocked carefully on the door, paused.

“Morning,” Grantaire said, and got to see Enjolras jump about a foot.

“Rachel!” Enjolras hissed, wrong-footed.

Grantaire smiled, idiotic. He was so tired it was like he was floating, and the hallway was a bright haze. “Eve-Marie,” he responded.

“Argh,” said Enjolras. Then, “I was trying to catch you before you went to the studio.”

“I’ve been,” said Grantaire happily, leaning against a wall. “I’ve been kicked out.”

“Kicked-”

“Not like  _ that,  _ Apollo.”

“Don’t call me that. Give me the basket, you’re leaning. Are you, erm, ill?”

Grantaire shook his head. Even the way his tightly corkscrewed curls bumped and flowed across his forehead felt dreamy, delicious. “What were you looking for us for?” he mumbled. His eyes were closed, but still the world happily buzzed around him. Enjolras was taking care of things.

“I was looking for you because we still need to do what Euphrasie Fauchelevent asked of us. Where’s your key, Grantaire?”

Before Enjolras could decide to - god in heaven - go through his pockets, Grantaire quickly turned up his key and tossed it, eyes still closed, to Enjolras. Then he remembered Enjolras was holding Amantine’s basket and his eyes flew open. He saw Enjolras, holding the key, an eyebrow raised. He didn’t say anything though, and opened Grantaire’s door.

“The mademoiselle, yes, the girl who was trying to run away,” Grantaire murmured, stumbling to crack a shutter, despite the chill. He then crossed to the stove and stocked it with coals and managed not to burn himself in lighting it. It was the best for warming his rooms.

Done with that, he sat down on his piano stool and rubbed his face hard, trying to force his brain to spit out the details. The convent adventure seemed now like a blur which hinged upon two women: the maiden and the Mother Superior. For good reason, he thought, the Mother Superior had dominated his memory of the event. But in that memory, in the shadow of Eujolie Enjolras, was the strange girl with the silver-blonde hair and the mess of contradictions and oddities. She’d been running away, but had helped them run away instead. Her name was French and her accent strongly English - and what a name! “Euphrasie”, a mad joy.

“I made a promise to Euphrasie Fauchelevent,” Enjolras said evenly, picking Amantine up out of her basket so that she could but her head against his chest. She was doing that a lot lately. It made it even harder to hold her, but Grantaire wasn’t worried, even when she started to cry.

“Could you burp her,” he said only, “I think Ciprian doesn’t pat her firmly enough.”

Enjolras didn’t even question being ordered around, just found a rag for his shoulder and hauled Amantine onto it, patting her back rhythmically. Grantaire tried to remember, but of course Enjolras had done this for her before, since he’d fed her that time he’d watched her at the Giovanna. And then, how had he known what to do? He’d had an older sibling, but neither he nor childhood friend Aurore Dupin had mentioned younger siblings.

Had he learned to do it just from watching Grantaire that very, very first time, when he’d come storming into Grantaire’s rooms and met Amantine the first time, before she had a name?

“The Euphrasie girl, she wanted us to write to her father?”

“Which we are doing, yes,” replied Enjolras.

“I think most girls must hate the convent for some or all of their imprisonment there,” said Grantaire carefully. “I don’t want to get her hopes or her father’s worries up.”

“I made a promise, on my honor, Grantaire.”

Grantaire waved a lazy hand. His eyes were trying to shut.

“Good thing you promised on yours and not on mine,” he said, smiling. He couldn’t seem to stop smiling, it was ridiculous. “Write a draft and I’ll, y’know, make my inputs.”

Enjolras sighed, but Grantaire heard him searching Grantaire’s desk for pen and inkpot, so he figured he could just sit back for a bit.

Thus, note was dispatched from Rue d’Elephante on the south bank to Rue Plumet on the north, courtesy of Ève-Marie Enjolras and Rachèl Grantaire.

“Why use my name?” asked Rachèl, sitting up long enough to sign where Ève-Marie had indicated on the note, adding as it occurred to him, “For that matter, why my address? I’m sure even you have a home, not a sea you return to, every morning to be reborn.”

“You are mixing your metaphors, Bacchus,” Eve-Mare said acerbically, but was distracted. In the mess of Grantaire and Amantine’s rooms he was hunting for a softwax candle with which to seal the letter. “And you’re more often at home than I, anyhow. Everyone else is going to the opera tonight.”

Tragically for Rachèl, this was true. He was so distracted by the strangeness of their newest bickering point that he did not notice or question a grisettes’ nickname on Enjolras’s lips.

“Have you even read it?” demanded Ève-Marie as Rachèl signed with a flourish, and blotted carefully.

“I trust you,” Rachèl said with as much bored apathy as he could muster, to see how far Ève-Marie could be needled.

“I’ll run this down to the portress,” Enjolras said, not rising to the bait. Tragic. Sometime after his tread disappeared down the stairs, Grantaire fell asleep, slumped over on his bed. He awoke a few hours later judging by the light, and was midway through the struggle to keep from falling back asleep - Amantine disliked going more than two hours between meals, and would doubtless be hungry - when he registered through barely cracked eyes that Enjolras was still there, perched on the piano stool and feeding Amantine with the new bottle, humming what sounded suspiciously like Ca Ira again.

After the milk was gone, Grantaire listened, mostly asleep, to Enjolras’s footsteps crossing his floor as he held Amantine and walked with her until she fell asleep, or Grantaire did, and that was all. When Grantaire woke the second time, he was gone.

 

Grantaire considered avoiding his bakery after last quitting it being chased by the police, but ran into the issue that, like any good Frenchman, he was obsessively loyal to his baker. He found he could not quite enjoy the different bread at the bakery two minutes further away. It was too crusty, and the alternative baker did not ever make challah, even though it was nearly Hanukkah and Rachèl’s baker traditionally spent the autumnal holidays absolutely spoiling him.

He did have reason to look both very apologetic and very paranoid when he finally slunk forth, but to a woman who, as he had mentioned before, had seen him vomit on her wares  _ and _ carrying around an unexplained baby, this was old hat. She stared him down, and he produced a meek suggestion that he would happily repaint her sign, and that was nearly that.

Then, she grabbed him, and he thought he’d have to offer up more recompense - maybe paint a miniature? - when she said, “Someone left this for you here,” and passed him a letter.

In bewilderment he took it, overpaid her, and stumbled back onto the street. There he paused to open it.

The note read,

_ My Dear Sirs, _

_ We are on opposing sides of the battlefield, as it were, and I do not presume to think we can find much common ground in our honorable beliefs. However, I wish, with your allowance, to put forward an apology sincere enough to convince, I hope, your honorable selves that I consider all of us Men, and thus respect my fellow combatants as Men and Warriors. _

_ My meaning, dear sirs, is to express my utmost horror and apologies for the conduct of my partner in Justice and All Things, that is, my fellow police-man. The use of a pistol in a social environment, in the presence of Innocents and/or The Young, is Reprehensible, and because I have read it I know, against the most precious Guide-book of the police-man. _

_ Respectfully & Cordially, _

_ Marius Pontmercy, _

_ Police-Man, esq. _

_ Post-Script: I have included, bashfully, a sonnet, in effort to express myself and my Feelings in the words of the Sublime _

 

__ O thieves of nothing, hark my cry!   
My rightly part is justice, the pursuit of   
Yet from the righteous Marius doth fly   
A wretch unfit for a police-man’s glove!

__ With lightning strike me, if you must   
For as a Frenchman I comprehend honor.   
And as a soul we all return to dust   
Especially if one’s police-partner is a  connard

__ Believe me, I tell you true!   
I am earnest as a virginal duchess.   
As on my deathbed I turn a pale blue   
Still my bloody wrongs I will rise to redress.

_ Slay me, friends, and from my grave   
I’ll yell - I’m sorry for those I could not save! _

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- hi marius!!   
> \- the periodic table doesn't exist yet, but Combeferre is hot on its heels  
> \- combeferre is A FUCKING NERD and he is so loved  
> \- it's only implied but to make it clear, Courfeyrac speaks at least enough arabic to understand the gist of combeferre's yelling  
> \- Hugo actually based Les Amies de l'ABC on Les Amies du Peuple, but in this fic they're separate entities  
> \- if you ever do any sort of Literature degree in France, expect FIVE MILLION YEARS of hearing about the grand & petit cenacles. That bit's all from memory, but I'll fact check when I have time to do a more thorough edit.   
> \- "connard" is not a nice word


End file.
